Archive for 2007

Site 1 (http://www.similarminds.com)

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

——————-
Site 2 (http://www.personalityonline.com/)

Enneagram – Your Results

Your Enneagram Type(s): Type 8
Eight’s need to be powerful to make their own way in life. They are motivated to maintain territorial control over anything that can influence their lives and by the desire to stay on top in any power struggle Of all the Enneagram types, they are the most openly aggressive. They are dominant figures both at work and at home.

They enjoy being strong and judge others according to whether those others are strong or weak. They also enjoy confronting others, and are even willing to take on the whole power structure if they feel a need for radical change. Eight’s are courageous and will crusade for what they believe in. They bring abundant energy to meeting challenges at work or elsewhere.

They are “natural leaders.” Their overwhelming self-confidence is contagious and can generate in others the energy that is necessary to accomplish monumental tasks.

You can get a full decription of the ‘type eight’ here.

Born in 1906, lived through the USSR.

Photo: Sergei Grits/AP
Alexandra Zhaldybina, 101, signs papers Sunday before voting

Photo: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Competitors warm up Sunday during the International Fitness

I upgraded WordPress yesterday and ran into some problems today with the .htaccess rewrite rules, which I’ve just fixed. I’m sharing these rules below. This is for people who are looking to write .htaccess rules for their WordPress setup and need some idea of how to go about doing that.

Note: this is for a custom-structure setting of /%post_id%/. Modify your’s accordingly.

For Months:

RewriteRule ^blog/date/199([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=199$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/199([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=199$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=200$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=200$1$2 [L]

These are doubled to account for an absent trailing slash.

For Months that are broken into pages (again doubled for a missing slash, and here I’m not taking into account any postings from the 1990s):

RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/page/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=200$1$2&paged=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/page/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=200$1$2&paged=$3 [L]

For basic entries:

RewriteRule ^/blog/?p=([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?p=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?p=$1 [L]

The first rule above takes into account anyone’s old links to your pages using the default format. The second rule assumes a trailing slash, and the third rule assumes a forgotten slash.

For pages:

This example uses my About page, which under the default url-setting has an id of 2. Again doubled for slashes:

RewriteRule ^blog/about/$ /blog/?page_id=2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/about$ /blog/?page_id=2 [L]

Categories are similar:

RewriteRule ^blog/category/uncategorized/$ /blog/?cat=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/category/zeitgeist/$ /blog/?cat=9 [L]

With Categories you need to set up the rules to match the category name with its id number. Although as of the latest iterations of WordPress, categories have been replaced with tags, and I haven’t fully crossed-over to that yet, so I’m not sure what’s involved there.

Andrew Sullivan writes about Barack Obama (via Richard Florida’s blog):

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Chomsky at the Ryerson Q&A (1988)

Take the emphasis on professional sports. It sounds harmless but it really isn’t. Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You’re supposed to cheer for your home team. Just to mention something from personal experience – I remember, very well, when I was I guess, a high school student – a sudden revelation when I asked myself why am I cheering for my high school football team. I don’t know anybody on it, if I met anybody on it we’d probably hate each other. You know, why do I care if they win or if some guy a couple blocks away wins? And then you can say the same thing about the baseball team or whatever else it is. This idea of cheering for your home team -which you mentioned before – that’s a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power. And it’s a very dangerous thing. And I think it’s one of the reasons it gets such a huge play. Or . . . let’s move to something else. The indoctrination that’s done by T.V. and so on is not trying to pile up evidence and give arguments and so on. It’s trying to inculcate attitudes. I mentioned a couple of cases but there are a lot more. Let’s take, say, the bombing of Libya. Why did the American public support the bombing of Libya? Well, the reason is that there had been a very effective, and careful, and intense inculcation of racist attitudes about Arabs. Anti-Arab racism is the one form of racism in the United States that’s considered legitimate. I mean, plenty of people are racist, but you don’t like to admit it. On the other hand, with regard to anti-Arab racism you admit it openly. You read a journal like, say, The New Republic, and the kinds of things that they say about Arabs . . . if anyone said them about Jews you’d think you were reading (Der Stern). I’m not joking. And nobody notices it because anti-Arab racism is so profound. There are novels that have a form of anti-Arab racism that’s hair-raising. The same is true of television shows and so on and so forth. An image has been created – the media are part of this, not all – of the Arab terrorist lurking out there ready to kill us. And against that background you could bomb Libya and people would cheer. Recall how effective that was, remember what was happening in 1986, there are a lot of measures of how effective this is. Remember that in 1986 when this happened the tourism industry in Europe was virtually wiped out because Americans were afraid to go to Europe, where incidentally, objectively, they would be about a hundred times as safe as in any American city. That’s no joke. But they were afraid to go to Europe because they got these Arab terrorists out there trying to kill us. Now, that was not from New York Times editorials, that was from a whole array of television and novels and soap operas and a mass of symbolism and so on and so forth and that’s effective. The anticommunist hysteria is developed that way too. The communists are out there ready to kill us – who are the communists? – I don’t know, they’re out there ready to kill us. This is introduced by the kinds of symbolism that T.V. is good at, and cheap novels are good at and so on and that’s important. These are critical means of indoctrination it’s just that I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about the more intellectual side.

(source)

From The End of Virtuous Albion, (on the British National Character), by Theodore Dalrymple (originally published in the New Criterion, 1 September 2005):

On walking through the hospital in which I formerly practiced, I came across the husband of a patient of mine who had always accompanied her to her appointments. He was sitting down and waiting to be called for an examination. He was much thinner than I had seen him before, and he was so jaundiced that he was almost orange in color. At his age, this could mean only one thing: hepatic secondaries in the liver, and fast-approaching death.

I passed the time of day with him, and wished him and his wife well, though I knew that he was dying, he knew that he was dying, and he knew that I knew that he was dying.

“We’ll just have to do the best we can” he said.

Indeed, he died two weeks later. There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life.

I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary–a claim they would never have made for themselves–but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.

While Kate Blanchette in armour and on horseback, with long red hair flowing from her wigged scalp, looking a good twenty years younger than her supposed age of 55 (which in 16th Century terms is a miracle) is visually resplendent, it captures nothing of the woman who wrote Monsieur’s Departure.

Queen Elizabeth on horseback at the

Queen Elizabeth Playing the Lute, (1576)

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

– Queen Elizabeth I

_____________
“Monsieur” is identified in two MSS as the duke of Anjou, who withdrew from marriage negotiations in 1582, and in one MS as Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex, whose long-lived affection for Elizabeth ended in a rebellion that resulted in his execution on a warrant signed by Elizabeth. (source)

Goodreads | 2007 week 42 number 6 (Doris Lessing Selection)

From Doris Lessing’s introduction to The Golden Notebook (June 1971):

To get the subject of Women’s Liberation over with – I support it, of course, because women are second-class citizens, as they are saying energetically and competently in many countries. It can be said that they are succeeding, if only to the extent they are being seriously listened to. All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: ‘I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways.’ This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by this who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. I don’t think Women’s Liberation will change much though – not because there is anything wrong with its aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.

But this novel [The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being the theme of ‘She is unfeminine’, ‘She is a man-hater’. This particular reflex seems indestructible. Men – and many women, said that the suffragettes were de-feminized, masculine, brutalized. There is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe this reaction from men – and some women. A lot of women were angry about The Golden Notebook. What women will say to other women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing they will say aloud – a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man says: You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are unmanning me. It is my belief that any woman who marries, or takes seriously in any way at all, a man who uses this threat, deserves everything she gets. For such a man is a bully, does to know anything about the world he lives in, or about its history…

[…]

This business of seeing what I was trying to do – it brings me to the critics, and the danger of evoking a yawn. This sad bickering between writers and critics, playwrights and critics: the public have got so used to it they think, as of quarreling children: ‘Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again.’ Or: ‘You writers get all the praise, or if not praise, at least all that attention- so why are you so perennially wounded?’ And the public are quite right. For reasons I won’t go into here, early and valuable experiences in my writing life gave me a sense of perspective about critics and reviewers … It is that writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself who has seen what one is reaching for, and who judges you only by whether you have matched up to your aim or not. I have never yet met a writer who, faced at last with that rare being, a real critic, doesn’t lose all paranoia and become gratefully attentive – he has found what he thinks he needs. But what he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

It is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they purport to provide – and for which writers so ridiculously and childishly yearn.

This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training is in the opposite direction.

It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, ‘places’, ‘streams’, stars – and still in many places, stripes. This horse-race mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z had shown himself as better than Writer A.’ From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief – though this is not the place to develop this – and the talents every child has, regardless of his official ‘IQ’, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

The other things taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply,

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already molded by a system, he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further molding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

These children who have spent years inside the training system becomes critics and reviewers, and cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for – imaginative and original judgment. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking – the climate of opinion. They are like litmus paper. They are wind gauges – invaluable. They are the most sensitive of barometers of public opinion. You can see changes of mood and opinion here sooner than anywhere except in the political field – it is because these are people whose whole education has been just that – to look outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authority figures, to ‘received opinion’ – a marvelously revealing phrase.

It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’

Like every other writer I get letters all the time from young people who are about to write theses and essays about my books in various countries – but particularly in the United States. They all say: ‘Please give me a list of the articles about your work, the critics who have written about you, the authorities.’ They also ask for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important, amounting to a dossier, like an immigration department’s.

These requests I answer as follows: ‘Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to a write a thesis – and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you – then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black.’

‘Dear Writer’ – they reply. ‘But I have to know what the authorities say, because if I don’t them, my professor won’t give me any marks.’

This is an international system, absolutely identical from the Urals to Yugoslavia, from Minnesota to Manchester.

The point is, we are all so used to it, we no longer see how bad it is. I am not used to it, because I left school when I was fourteen. There was a time I was sorry for this, and believed I had missed out on something valuable. Now I am grateful for a lucky escape.

[…]

You might be saying: This is an exaggerated reaction, and you have no right to it, because you say you have never been part of the system. But I think it is not at all exaggerated, and that the reaction of someone from outside is valuable simply because it is fresh and not biased by allegiance to a particular education.

But after this investigation, I had no difficulty in answering my own questions: Why are they so parochial, so personal, so small-minded? Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole? Why is their interpretation of the word critic always to find fault? Why are they always seeing writers in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other … simple, this is how they are trained to think. That valuable person who understands what you are doing, what you are aiming for, and give you advice and real criticism, is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system; it may be a student just beginning, and still in love with literature, or perhaps it may be a thoughtful person who reads a great deal, following his own instinct.

I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: ‘There is only way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down – even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written – and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this – are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book or one author means that you are badly taught – you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people’.

Leaks, woes a smudge on Crystal’s sparkle
VAL ROSS

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

October 3, 2007 at 1:00 AM EDT

Good thing it was a dry summer. The new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto’s most talked-about new edifice, leaks.

At least, it did leak. Water penetrated the north end of the long window of the C5 restaurant, and puddles have appeared near windows on the third and fourth floors.

The ROM’s CEO, William Thorsell, pushed to open the new Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystal and the rest of the renovated ROM on June 1. As construction accelerated, the contractors responsible for installing the Crystal’s cladding system warned that temporary seams around windows might leak. In August, they mopped up and repaired the problems.

As winter approaches, fingers are crossed that there will be no more puddles, and that the Crystal’s cladding, designed to prevent it from turning into an avalanche-maker, will function as well in cold reality as it does in theory. But it’s clear, four months into the Crystal’s life, the new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.

An unveiling concert in June shows the Crystal in Toronto. Its new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.

Far more daunting are the problems of mounting exhibits in the strange new spaces, ensuring public safety and budgeting for the new reality.

There are rumours that the Crystal’s oddly shaped, difficult-to-access windows have increased window-cleaning costs by $200,000, a figure ROM’s executive director of capital development and facilities, Al Shaikoli, disputes.

“But it is considerable,” he admitted. “In the old days, our window-cleaning budget was next to nothing.”

Safety issues are a surprise. “We didn’t predict human behaviour,” Mr Shaikoli said. On the June weekend of its grand, all-night opening, ROM staffers discovered that, particularly after the bars closed, visitors seemed more interested in the Crystal as a playground than as architecture. Staff were alarmed to see people crawling out on windows slanting over Bloor Street, apparently testing their strength.

“Mind you, these galleries were naked spaces,” Mr. Shaikoli said. “Once they’re filled with artifacts, people will be more respectful.” Display cases will soon be installed in the paths of future adventurers.

Another discovery was a trail of footprints most of the way up a fourth-floor wall that rises at a 30-degree angle. “Probably a kid took a run at it,” speculates Dan Rahimi, director of gallery development. Baseboards and stainless steel barriers are being installed to signal that a wall is a wall, even if it’s not on the straight and narrow.

“One of our major bugbears was that William wanted everything open and accessible,” says Janet Waddington, assistant curator of paleontology. “But you can’t do that – the Toronto public is extraordinarily destructive.”

Even in the old dinosaur galleries, says Ms. Waddington, people used to reach across railings to pat the prosaurolophus bones. In the ROM’s Crystal dinosaur gallery, two ancient marine reptile skeletons, a pleiosaur and a mosasaur, have been suspended from an overhanging face of the Crystal (the ceiling is too high), which puts their irreplaceable old bones within arm’s reach. By the time the gallery opens in December, a plinth or base underneath, surrounded with barriers, will keep the public’s hands at bay. “It has been horrendous,” said Ms. Waddington, “but very exciting.”

The problem of installing artifacts in a space with no vertical walls challenged Hiroshi Sugimoto, the first artist to be exhibited in the ROM’s fourth-floor Institute for Contemporary Culture. So, he designed a curving wall 4.3 metres high and 27.5 metres long, fitted with special lighting, to counteract the angular architecture. Total cost to the ROM: about $200,000. The wall was recently removed to make room for a new show of aboriginal contemporary art that opens on Saturday.

Special new display cases have been bought to match the galleries, some with trapezoidal shapes. As well, the renovation has opened the entire building, old and new parts, to more daylight, which risks bleaching museum artifacts. So the museum has acquired special blinds that filter out 96 per cent of ultraviolet light, as well as blackout blinds that block exterior light.

“Daniel didn’t design this building based on the collections,” said Mr. Rahimi. “We had to design the collections to go with the building. We have an aesthetic imperative – partly because the architecture is so strong.”

At this resolution, the Monet damaged over the weekend is almost photographic.

From the Facebook group ‘Everyone’s an Art Critic: Toronto’ discussion topic.

Topic: What themes do you see in contemporary Toronto Art?

01. Gareth Bate wrote on Sep 17, 2007 at 4:56 PM
Do you notice any general themes in Toronto art? Any medium or imagery that is particularly prevelant?

02 .Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 18, 2007 at 8:26 PM
Not relevant, but just annoying and utterly useless trends:

1. Birds: especially orioles and finch-like creatures.

2. Deer: to play on the ‘woodsy’ theme alongside the birds.
[Could this be a flash of modern Canadiana?]

3. Neon colours, such as bright magenta, cyan, and yellow.

4. And the act of drawing on walls. Carrie, this one’s for you!

Maybe they are relevant in one way or another; I’m sure they are somehow. But on the surface, the sheer repetitiveness of it all becomes nerve-wracking and a complete turn-off.

03. Gareth Bate replied to Martin’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 5:51 AM
At the queen west art crawl there was an awful lot of picky little pencil drawings. Really precious stuff.

04. Kurt Rostek replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 4:20 PM
I’m seeing a lot of what I would call an almost frivolous if not cartoonish works..with toys, dolls …childlike memorabilia..

05. Stanzie Tooth (OCAD) wrote on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:17 AM
I’ve been seeing alot of micro/ macro stuff- semi-abstract thing based on: diseases, cells- general closeups of bodily fluids, etc.

06. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:37 AM
i see that martin has hurt my feelings 🙁

07. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 3:27 PM
Hence, art criticism.

😉

08. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 4:41 AM
I’m going to fight you

09. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 6:03 AM
Bring it on, dear.
I’m ready!

10. Robert Farmer wrote on Sep 21, 2007 at 12:15 PM
let’s cover it in resin!

11. Alex Mcleod replied to Robert’s post on Sep 23, 2007 at 10:17 AM
only photo collages though

12. Rachel McRae replied to Martin’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 9:22 PM
As an artist who works with deer imagery a lot I feel I need to respond.

If the use of deer is a “trend” its one with quite a rich history. Beyond mere “Canadiana,” it recalls symbolic use stretching across a vast track of geography (across all continents except Antarctica and Australia) and time (Paleolithic cave paintings in Cave Trois Frères in southern France feature a “shaman” figure crowned with horns.) The deer figures prominently in heraldry internationally, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Celtic.. A whole mass of religious/cultures groups use the deer as a symbol. Deer appear frequently in classic/neo-classic still lifes and imagery of the hunt…

An animal of such widespread dispersement, a rich food source (and thus economic importance) is bound to become a weighty cultural symbol. Though you yourself may not hunt deer, wear deer skin, engage directly with the animal in any way, you do have a certain connection with it. You’re talking about “art,” practicing I can only assume, and art’s connection with the deer-as-symbol is vast and dense.

Any practice with history must dialogue with its past. (Otherwise, I would argue; it is not art. If I may express a personal opinion, art becomes art when it is engaged with its historical cannon. Otherwise it is something distinct. That being said, engagement is not synonymous with compliance or agreeance.)

(With all due respect, I wouldn’t apply the term “useless” so lightly.)

13. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Rachel’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 10:34 PM
So, why is deer imagery so ‘important’ (or rampant) in Toronto NOW?

14. Therese Cilia (OCAD) wrote on Sep 28, 2007 at 11:19 AM
I’m getting the impression from this board that themes and trends in art is generally a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. To me, trends are inevitable and unavoidable. We’re all questioning the same universe and have been since we’ve been on this planet. We’re going to be talking about our past and our present, we’re looking at the same things and being influenced by the same things – that’s culture! We’re seeing birds, butterflies, deer, and micro/macroscopic life because they’re HERE, and so are we. If the work is ‘authentic’, not just following a trend but actually being it and questioning it, (and I know we can all realize the difference, it’s what makes a good painting a good painting or not), then birds, cells or deer – it all doesn’t matter.

As an aside, I’d like to say that the Ann Hamilton lecture was EXCITING. It actually made me a little nostalgic to be in school again and be surrounded in that atmosphere. If you’re a graduate, you know what I mean?
I love that when I hear or read Ann Hamilton, I get the feeling that her work and her voice I can never quite grasp, but am so close to getting. She’ll say or do something really profound that leaves you wanting more because you can never quite keep it all in your head. If that makes any sense at all. I love it.

15. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) wrote on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:54 PM
Deer “heads” was reintroduced into the contemporary International art scene when much of the critical discourse centred on the Archive and the museums/institutions role of dominating/destroyer/preserver of nature…and it’s also retro–like Victorian riffed wallpaper…what goes around comes around, and it finally hit Toronto

YOU CANNOT DENY OSMOSIS

popular motifs develop organically not necessarily meaning one is “following” a trend, especially if each artist has a different critical approach and style

deer heads and birds and neon is what will mark this generation of paintings as opposed to cubic abstraction or big eyed paintings, etc. is that a bad thing? no…seriously…everyone in TO working with the same motifs should put out and imprint with essays championing the varying reasons behind the use of neon/birds/dear…with Martin writing the forward 😉

seriously…it will give Martin a topic to lecture future OCAD students about

AND AS FAR AS DRAWING ON WALLS:

for me, Dood was a mere momentary interruption of the usual really bad community arts practice with the synthesis of participatory culture theory made manifest in the physical and digital realms

😉

16. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Robert’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:59 PM
covering it in resin was sooo last years TIFF 😉

it made the 3 or so resinless paintings really stand out

i swear thats the only reason I go to TIFF, is to see which trend has exhausted itself into implosion

17. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Carrie’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 1:02 PM
we could call the book “deers, birds, neon OH MY!”

18. Gareth Bate replied to Rachel’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 9:31 PM
Can you post a link to your work?

19. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Carrie’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 11:30 PM
“I’ll foreword anytime!” says the next up-and-coming art historian/editor/anthologist. I have big plans ahead, Carrie…

;P

20. Liz Pead wrote on Oct 4, 2007 at 12:19 PM
As a landscape painter, I find this thread really interesting.

Deer and birds are often around me, but like people in city scapes, I omit them in the landscape.
There’s something tacky about portraying deer and other animals in art – I grew up with string-art and velvet paintings in New Brunswick. Jacking deer was a passtimje, but also a necessity for some as a source of a winter’s worth of meat.

Depicting animals, especially by people who grew up in the suburban/ urban experience so often found here in Canada ( not that I’m making any assumtions about any of you and where you grew up!!!) is kind of sweet. I don’t see it any different =than me going up to Algonquin Park every summer and painting my idea of the pretty northern, pristine landscape. It is a potent form of nostalgia that I have for an environment I both remember from my past in New Brunswick surrounded by trees and a form of nostalgia for these natural things which are disappearing very quickly before me.

As for them being trends? Maybe we are reacting more than we know to our envirnomental breaking down…m uch more violently than we can even put into words.

A couple of years ago ( SPring 2006?) Border Crossings mag did a whole issue dealing with Animals, Im going to revisit it and see if it makes any more sense to me now than it did then ( I was finishing my thesis at that point and unless it was hockey or landsacpe it kinda went by me…)

Any thoughts?

From the perspective of space, where there is no gravity, there is also no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily objective. Scan the map with the south pole on top and you see the world entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width – and thus its majesty – as it narrows ‘northward’ into the atrophied limb of Central America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness to the top, insufficiently connected to the other continental bodies.

Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable to the emergence of life in countless forms – three quarters of its surface lies within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all ultimately belong, from where human beings acquired their deepest genetic traits. ‘We are all Africans under the skin,’ says anthropologist Christopher Stringer. Africa is nature write large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet, writes:

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.

From Wikipedia: ‘The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin mediterraneus, “inland” (medius, “middle” + terra, “land, earth”). To the ancient Romans, the Mediterranean was the center of the earth as they knew it.’

Scr. Romae m. Quint. a 689 (65).

CICERO ATTICO SAL.

‘Letters were usually headed with the name of the writer in the nominative and that of the recipient in the dative governed by the greeting, ‘S.D’ or ‘SAL.’ = salutem dat. The fullness of the names and the greeting was in inverse proportion to the intimacy of the correspondents. In familiar letters only the cognomen was used (Cicero, Attico, &c.), but such apruptness in a formal letter was boorish’.

Correct: Tim to Ed
Correct: Timothy Charles Comeau to Whom it May Concern

Official or other formal communications should give the full style and titles of both the writer and the recipient, and add other greeting, ‘S.V.B.E.E.Q.V’ or the like.

Correct: Timothy Charles Comeau to The Right Honourable Prime Minster Stephen Joseph Harper, SVBEEQV
Incorrect (boorish): Tim to Steve (like, yo!)

Scr. Romae m. Quint. a 689 (65).

CICERO ATTICO SAL.

Petitionis nostrae …

To Atticus
Rome, early July 689 AUC, 65 BC

As to my canvas for the consulship …

(source of Cicero image)

“Listening to the metronome of some 18 year-old getting plowed in the room above me by an old fraternity brother”.

How conflict creates peace:

Pullo: ‘They’ll think we’ve gone soft’
Vorenus: ‘Let them. We need time to regain our strength. While they’re fighting over the spoils of the Argosy, we’ll be recruiting men and restoring order.’

Rome (Season 2, ‘Heroes of the Republic’)

The 19C produced a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western Civilization, namely a hundred year’s peace – 1815-1914. Apart from the Crimean War [1853-56] – a more or less colonial event – England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, and Russia were engaged in war among each other for altogether only 18 months. A computation of comparable figures for the preceding two centuries [1600, 1700s] gives an average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each. But even the fiercest of 19C conflagrations, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, ended after less than a year’s duration with the defeated nation being able to pay over an unprecedented sum as an indemnity without any disturbance of the currencies concerned.

This triumph of pragmatic pacifism was certainly not the result of an absence of grave causes for conflict. Almost continuous shifts in the internal and external conditions of powerful nations and great empires accompanied this irenic pageant. During the first part of the century civil wars, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary interventions were the order of the day. In Spain a 100,000 troops under the Duc d’Angoulème stormed Cadiz; in Hungary the Magyar revolutions threatened to defeat the Emperor himself in pitched battle and was ultimately suppressed only by a Russian army fighting on Hungarian soil. Armed interventions in the Germanies, in Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Venice marked the omnipresence of the Holy Alliance. During the second half of the century the dynamics of progress was released; the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Sheriffian empires broke up or were dismembered; China was forced by invading armies to open her door to the foreigner and in one gigantic haul the continent of Africa was partitioned. Simultaneously, two powers rose to world importance: the United States and Russia. National unity was achieved by Germany and Italy; Belgium, Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary assumed, or resumed, their places as sovereign states on the map of Europe. An almost incessant series of open wars accompanied the march of industrial civilization into the domains of outworn cultures or primitive peoples. Russia’s military conquests in Central Asia, England’s numberless Indian and African wars, France’s exploits in Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, Syria, Madagascar, Indo-China, and Siam raised issues between the Powers which, as a rule, only force can arbitrate. Yet every single one of these conflicts was localized, and numberless other occasions for violent change were either met by joint action or smothered into compromise by the Great Powers. Regardless of how the methods changed, the result was the same. While in the first part of the century constitutionalism was banned and the Holy Alliance suppressed freedom in the name of peace, during the other half – and again in the name of peace – constitutions were foisted upon turbulent despots by business-minded bankers. Thus under varying forms of ever-shifting ideologies – sometimes in the name of progress and liberty, sometimes by the authority of the throne and the altar, sometimes by grace of the stock exchange and the checkbook, sometimes by corruption and bribery, sometimes by moral argument and enlightened appeal, sometimes by the broadside and the bayonet – one and the same result was attained: peace was preserved.

This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more unites capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek and Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Munster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the 19C the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian.

The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the 18C, JJ Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty.

After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution is establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.

The bearers of the ‘peace interest’ were, as usual, those who chiefly benefited by it, namely, the cartel of dynasts and feudalists whose patrimonial positions were threatened by the revolutionary wave of patriotism that was sweeping the Continent. Thus, for approximately a third of a century the Holy Alliance provided the coercive force and the ideological impetus for an active peace policy; its armies were roaming up and down Europe putting down minorities and repressing majorities. From 1846 to about 1871 – ‘one of the most confused and crowded quarter centuries of European history’ – peace was less safely established, the ebbing strength of reaction meeting the growing strength of industrialism. In the quarter century following the Franco-Prussian War we find the revived peace interest represented by that new powerful entity, the Concert of Europe.

I used to say I was born in the wrong century. The way overly dramatic kids claim to be old souls living in the present day, I was convinced I was secretly an impressionist painter, meant more for turn of the century’s demi-monde opulence rather than today’s world of animators, illustrators, and monster movie artists. I didn’t go to art school. I don’t know all the proper techniques. I learned colour theory by doing graffiti, but the story of the graffiti-artist-turned-fine-art-painted has been played out since the mid-’80s. My own life seemed to be working against me. I was convinced I should have been born in 1850.

Then I realized that I was approaching everything wrong. I live in Hollywood, this century’s den of inequity and excess. I have eccentric colourful friends that rival the models of Degas and Renoir, I spend nights at Los Angeles bars that could rival those painted by Monet, and as this is 2007 I have access to neon pink and hot orange that I imagine even Van Gogh wouldn’t know how to utilize. I am a contemporary painter interested in historic themes. There isn’t anything wrong with that. I don’t have any art school loans to pay back. I primarily paint women because I’m tremendously influenced by Klimt – and really focused on beauty.

Joshua Petker
http://www.joshuapetker.com/
(from this month’s Juxtapoz Sept 07 n 80)

This reminds me that the people of the ancient world were physically tinier than we are.

Source

Richard Morgan, from Black Man (UK) /Th1rte3n (US) (Amazon) pages 87-90:

‘So,’ he said..’if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?’

‘Variant thirteen?’ Jeff have him the crooked grin again. ‘Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood’.

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.’

‘You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there either.’

‘So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and super-virility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which is the end is suicide, just slower and bit more fucking fun.’

‘I thought they criminalized that stuff.’

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. ‘Oh, yeah and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.’

‘I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk show genetics, Jeff.’

‘Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a singly social biologist who doesn’t count alpha male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood’ – the grin again – ‘so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas want to be soldiers, because, hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes’ – and Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody – ‘they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking, the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep and breath hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with the. See, a feminized open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.’

‘I didn’t ask for a class on the secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen’.

‘Yeah, getting there.’ Jeff took another chunk of his arrack. ‘See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down there where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked and shut down with a halfway decent black market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a big-hearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship programme at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us with knowing it. […] You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.’

‘Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson’.

‘They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.’

‘I know.’

‘Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?’

‘Variant thirteen?’

‘Yeah, variant thirteen. Pre-civilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.’

‘Now you you sound like the feeds.’

Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. ‘Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.’

‘I fail to see,’ said Norton acidly, ‘how that gives us back our manhood.’

‘That’s because you live in New York.’
Norton snorted and drained his arrack. His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done.

‘I’m serious, Tom. You think secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?’

‘Among other things, yeah, it was.’

Jeff shook his head. ‘That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside of quantum specialists really understands, Co-Operation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table is pointing towards a future so feminized it’s just downright unAmerican.

Digital Bin Laden by Timothy Comeau

The current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur Rahman: ‘Actually it is even something of a misnomer to call such phenomena in Islam “fundamentalist” except insofar as they emphasize the basis of Islam as being the two original sources: the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’ Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘original thought’ and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalist ‘return to tradition’ is really a new invention.

The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalism might be understood, then, not a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony – and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony. [Shah’s Iran, Attaturk’s Turkey, Nasser’s Egypt] ‘If modern meant the pursuit of Western education, technology and industrialization in the first flush of the post-colonial period,’ Akbar Ahmed writes, ‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values and a rejection of modernism.’ Considered simply in cultural terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist theory – postmodern only because it chronologically follows and opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist, however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes ‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way, is novel because its basic élan is anti-Western … Hence its condemnation of classical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’ Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense ‘anti-Western’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution. (Hardt & Negri, Empire [2000] p. 148-149)

White Jesus amongst the White Aboriginals (from the Book of Mormon)

Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movement against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long US tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the ‘uncivilized’ world. The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous ere, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem. […]

The ‘traditional family’ that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street USA at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The ‘return to the traditional family’ of the Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order. (Hardt & Negri, Empire pages147-48)

From William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003):

‘How do you think we’ll look,’ Bigend asks, ‘to the future?’
[…]
‘They won’t think of us,’ Cayce says … ‘Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.’
‘I think they’ll hate us,’ says Helena.
‘Souls,’ repeats Bignend. […] ‘Souls?’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, on in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.’
‘Do we have a past then?’ Stonestreet asks.
‘History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,’ Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. ‘Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.’
‘The future is there,’ Cayce hers herself say, ‘looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.’
‘You sound oracular.’
‘I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.’ (pages 57-59)

[…]

‘Have you seen the guerrilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas? [Star Wars Ep I] […] They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films. Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s a though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else. (page 70)

From Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918):

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

From my Michael Jackson Project image (2003):

I want this painting to be in the AGO in 2116. I want kids on art school trips at the gallery to be bored while the underpaid instructor explains that a hundred years ago there lived this freak who commissioned a painting of himself surrounded by cherubs. She will say, ‘He had delusions of godlihood.’ Maybe she’ll even use big words with the kids, and say, ‘He aspired to an apotheosis in both physical and the musical forms’.Some might be interested, and they will go home and download Billy Jean and Thriller and watch the quaint 20th Century music videos and think, Thank God I didn’t live back then!

As interested as we are in mad Caligula, or the incestuous Lord Byron, most will go to their soy milk and cookies and not give a shit.

One of the things I love about William Gibson is his way with words. Such as below, in which he describes how Google is only really limited by one’s imagination of what to search for.

From an Amazon.com interview:

Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what’s out there and make it your own?

Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I’m lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I’m wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text. So people–and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition–would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

Amazon.com: You’re annotated out there.

Gibson: Yeah it’s sort of like there’s this nebulous extended text. [For one deeply involved annotation, visit Joe Clark’s PR-otaku site–and see if you ever come back.] Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it’s all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I’m sure a lot of writers haven’t yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction.

Amazon.com: So are you able to google during your writing day, or do you have to block that off and say, all right–

Gibson: No, I’ve got Word open on top of Firefox.

Amazon.com: That’s very courageous.

Gibson: It’s kind of the only way I can do it. It’s replaced looking out the window, but I have to have–

Amazon.com: You need a certain stimulation to work off of.

Gibson: Yeah, I need a certain stimulation. It kind of feels like when you’re floating underwater and you’re breathing through a straw. The open Firefox is the straw: like, I can get out of this if I have to. I can stay under until I can’t stand it anymore, and then I go to BoingBoing or something.

Amazon.com: I think for some writers, they’d never get back in the pool with Google open to them.

Gibson: It’s not that interesting for me. I’m okay with it because it doesn’t pull me in that much. The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There’s some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you’ve never seen before. You’re still really inside some annotated version of your own head.

~

On the images found at PlanetHiltron, Gibson writes:

Mesmerizing contra-idoru anti-portraits. A reminder of the extent to which posthumanity is already here, but not evenly distributed. Sweat on the underDepp‘s ringer worth price of admission.

From Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: Preface pages x-xi:

One might have supposed, in the circumstances, that a principle preoccupation of intellectuals, who after all are supposed to see farther and think more deeply than ordinary men and women, would be the maintenance of the boundaries that separate civilization from barbarism, since those boundaries have so often proved so flimsy in the past hundred years. One would be wrong to suppose any such thing, however. Some have knowingly embraced barbarism; others have remained unaware that boundaries do not maintain themselves and are in need of maintenance and sometimes vigorous defense. To break a taboo or to transgress are terms of the highest praise in the vocabulary of modern critics, irrespective of what has been transgressed or what taboo broken. A review of a recent biography of the logical positivist philosopher A.J. Ayer, in the Times Literary Supplement, enumerated the philosopher’s personal virtues. Among them was the fact the he was unconventional – but the writer did not feel called upon to state in what respect Ayer was unconventional. For the reviewer, Ayer’s alleged disregard of convention was a virtue in itself.

Of course, it might well have been a virtue, or it might equally well have been a vice, depending on the ethical content and the social effect of the convention in question. But there is little doubt that an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to nonintellectual. What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient – the very people most in the need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement. The result is moral, spiritual, and emotional squalor, engendering fleeting pleasures and prolonged suffering.

This is not to say, of course, that all criticism of social conventions and traditions is destructive and unjustified; surely no society in the world can have existed in which there was not much justly to criticize. But critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilization needs conservation at least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable of doing much – indeed devastating – harm. No man is so brilliant that he can work out for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to them. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.

Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals had made bad situation incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notion about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect. John Maynard Keynes wrote, in a famous passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that practical men might not have much time for theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers. I agree: except that I would now add novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers. They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they have to say and how they say it.

From Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post 9/11 World interviews with David Barsamian, interview recorded 3 December 2004:

David Barsamian: As I travel around the country, and I’m sure you do as well, you here this refrain about, well, ‘what’s the tipping point, what is it going to take for people to go out into the streets and protest?’ and the comments that are made are like, ‘well, you know, Americans are too comfortable, they’ve got it too easy’ and then this interesting one, that material things will have to get much worse before there is protest.

Noam Chomsky: I don’t think that’s true. In fact serious protest is often come from … (sometimes it comes from people who really are oppressed) sometimes its come from sectors of privilege. I mean take the case I mentioned about the [anti-vietnam-war] resistance movement; I mean these were privileged kids. You know, they were college students, almost all of them, from the elite schools. That’s privilege, but within those sectors of privilege, a spark was lit, which was recognized both by the oppressors and the oppressed and in ways that were psychologically extremely difficult, sometimes traumatic, as I said, sometimes they even led to suicide, they were not a joke. And the kids were under terrific strain, but very privileged and they played a big role in changing the country, I mean they infuriated their rich and powerful, I mean, take a look at the newspapers then, there’s all sorts of hysterical screeching about bra burning and all these horrible things that are going on undermining the foundations of civilization, yeah, etc. What was really going on was the country was getting civilized. And of course, that infuriated the people of power and wealth. How can you dare get civilized? You’re supposed to get beaten by our club. And yes, you can find at the fringes of any popular movement things that are crazy, and you can condemn and so on and so forth, part of the job of intellectuals is to focus on those, to try and discredit the important things that are happening, which are undermining of privilege and power.

From Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It‘s essay, ‘A Taste for Danger’; consider his thoughts on dress near the end:

The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent; and a rejection of everything associated with one’s childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it. It was in Africa that I first discovered that the bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic. […] I was still of the callow – and fundamentally lazy – youthful opinion that nothing in the world could change until everything changed, in which case a social system would arise in which it would be no longer necessary for anyone to be good. The head nurse of the war in which I worked, a black woman, invited me to her home in the township for a meal. […] In this unpromising environment, I discovered, the nurse had created an extremely comfortable and even pretty home for herself and her aging mother. Her tiny patch of land was like a bower; the inside of her house was immaculately clean, tidy, and well – though cheaply – furnished. I would never laugh again at the taste of people of limited means to make a comfortable home for themselves.

Looking around me in the township, I began to see that the spotlessly clean white uniform in which she appeared every day in the hospital represented not an absurd fetish, nor the brutal imposition of alien cultural standards upon African life, but a noble triumph of the human spirit – as, indeed, did her tenderly cared-for home. By comparison with her struggle to maintain herself in decency, my former rejection of bourgeois proprieties and respectability seemed to me ever afterward to be shallow, trivial, and adolescent. Until then I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a rejection of the superficiality and materialism of the bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of torn, worn-out, and tattered clothes – at least in public – by those in a position to dress otherwise without a feeling of deep disgust. Far from being a sign of solidarity with the poor, it is a perverse mockery of them; it is spitting on the graves of of our ancestors, who struggled so hard, so long, and so bitterly that we might be warm, clean, well fed, and leisured enough to enjoy the better things in life.

From the same Chomsky interview quoted above (Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post 9/11 World interviews with David Barsamian, interview recorded 3 December 2004) with my bolding to highlight another way of considering poverty of dress:

Noam Chomsky: Take where we are [MIT]. You walk down the halls today and you remember what it was like when you walked down the halls forty years ago. It’s radically different. I mean, forty years ago it was white males, well dressed, respectful to the elders and so on and so forth. You walk down the halls today, it’s going to be like any other university: half women, third minorities, casually dressed, informal relations. Those are not insignificant changes, and they’ve gone all through society.

David Barsamian: Are the hierarchies breaking down?

Noam Chomsky: Of course. I mean, if women are not, don’t have to live like my grandmother, or my mother, hierarchies have broken down. Namely the hierarchies that kept them that way. I mean, for example now, in the town where I live (professional, middle class town, lawyers, doctors, so on) I learned recently (I didn’t know this) that there’s a special section of the police which does nothing but answer 911 calls of domestic abuse. That’s what they do, there’s several a week. I mean, if it’s several a week out there, you can imagine what it is in a poor community. Did anything like that exist thirty years ago? Twenty years ago? I mean, I wasn’t even conceivable then, ‘that’s none of anybody’s business if somebody wants to beat up his wife’. I mean, the wife didn’t even complain. They may not like, but that’s life. Is that a change in hierarchy? You bet. And furthermore, it’s one part of a very broad social change.

Brian Lehrer: You raised three kids, didn’t you reward and punish them to promote desired behaviors?

Noam Chomsky: Well, we … see if you believe in [B.F.] Skinner’s doctrines you wouldn’t punish them. So if you’re talking about Skinner no wouldn’t punish them, you would reward them. But no, I wouldn’t say that’s the right way to raise kids. And in fact to the extent that people do it, it has at most a marginal effect on the children, probably mostly harmful. But for their growth and development, it largely takes place on the basis of the outgrowth of their innate capacities. That’s true in every domain that we know. It’s true in language, it’s true in moral development, it’s true in anything that’s been studied carefully – visual development and so on. By now, these are almost truisms in the sciences.

-Noam Chomsky on the Charlie Rose Show, guest hosted by Brian Lehrer, 9 June 2006

It is a pity that the word ‘art’ carries with it, to a person not interested in the subject or not versed in its history, a suggestion of luxury and of superfluity, as contrasted with the utilitarian or the practical. Where this possibly derogatory tinge of meaning is not suggested, there is generally at least a feeling that the matters which the word calls up are those of interest to the specialist in design rather than to the world at large. People who are supposed to be interested in ‘art’ might, according to this view, possibly not be interested in literature and history. Contrary-wise, people interested in history of in literature might not be interested in ‘art’.

It is true that in recent centuries, those namely of recent modern history, the arts of painting and sculpture at least, have become mainly matters of luxury, and that as arts of popular education and instruction they have been displaced by printed books. Hence the difficulty of making immediately apparent, before the subject itself has been opened up, that a history of art is not so much a history of that arts of design as it is a history of civilization. But if this point is not apparent in advance, it is notwithstanding the point in which in recent years has drawn more and more attention to the subject until it is beginning to figure as an indispensable part of the philosophy and knowledge of general history.

– Introduction to Roman and Medieval Art by W.H. Goodyear, 1893

Manuel de Landa: Right now, everybody and their mothers call themselves ‘critical’. You go to New York City bookstores and there are huge sections of bookshelves called Critical Theory. Of course, those theories are the most uncritical in the whole world. They call themselves critical but in the end are so uncritical because they take for granted all kinds of assumptions, they don’t really criticize themselves, and so forth. What I meant when I said ‘criticism as an antidote to propaganda’ would be a new type of criticism that is much more theoretically grounded and goes beyond the fake kind of criticism, or dogmatic criticism, that we have become used to. If we criticize the Internet by simply calling it a ‘capitalist tool’ or a ‘bourgeois tool’. That was a standard way in which Marxists criticized things in the past, attaching ‘bourgeois’ to everything they wanted to criticize and, bingo, you had instant criticism like you had instant coffee. Obviously, that kind of criticism is not going to do anything, and indeed has become a kind of propaganda itself. I mean, you criticize to propagandize your own idea. The question in front of us now as intellectuals is whether we’ve inherited so much bullshit and therefore our criticism is bound, is condemned to be ineffective, or whether we can find ways out or escape routes out of this and create a new brand of criticism that recovers its teeth, its ability to bite, its ability to intervene in reality in a more effective way. Again, it would imply a collective effort of a lot of intellectuals who are fed up with what had been labeled as criticism in the past and is nothing but dogma and repetition, and come up with a new brand of criticism that is capable of fighting propaganda. (source; emph mine)

From the 2007-05-02 show of Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I read in the headlines a story that’s gotten very little attention: in Alabama, federal authorities revealing they have broken up a militia plot to attack a group of Mexicans living in a small town north of Birmingham. Last week, six members of the Alabama Free Militia were arrested in a series of raids. The Birmingham News reported police uncovered truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher, 2,500 rounds of ammunition. The men appeared in court on Tuesday. But despite the violent plot, police did not accuse them of terrorism. Instead, police charged them with conspiracy to make a firearm, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a quarter of a million-dollar fine. The Anti-Defamation League says the weapons seizure was the largest in the South in years. Do you know about this group?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I’m really glad you brought that up. You know, I don’t know about this group in specific, but I think what we can extrapolate from this story is that the extreme right, militia groups, neo-Nazi groups, groups who should be considered domestic terrorists, see the anti-immigrant movement as their vehicle.

And, you know, there was an interesting, you know, story I noticed in 2000. The Michigan Militia effectively disbanded. This had the largest amount of members during the 1990s, during the heyday of the so-called anti-government militia movement. You know, they organized against Bill Clinton. Waco was their fantasy of black helicopters descending into their communities taking their guns away. And all the sudden they just disappeared. Where did they go?

The head of the Michigan Militia was interviewed, and he said, “Well, a lot of our guys like what’s going on now with the Republicans in power, and, you know, we’re looking to get into government, and we’re looking to support, you know, more mainstream causes, because they’re becoming more influential.” So you see an enormous cross-pollination between the membership rolls of the anti-government, domestic terrorist militias of the ’90s and groups like the Minutemen. So that’s what’s going on here.

And I think what we need to look out for, as the likelihood of a Democratic majority in government is very reasonable, you’re going to see a more extreme posture from these groups. Just imagine the scenario if Hillary Clinton in power, the perfect boogeyman for the anti-government right, a Democratic congress, you’re going to see them growing more and more extreme. And at the same time —

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve just passed the anniversary of the blowing up of the Oklahoma City building.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And at the same time, you’re going to see, you know, more vigilante action against immigrants. And, you know, it’s unfortunate that the government is not treating this as the threat that it is. They’re not treating it as domestic terrorism. Obviously, if these characters in Alabama were Arab Muslims, they would be on their way to some secret prison in Eastern Europe wearing diapers in a Learjet, ready to get waterboarded. But instead, you know, you’ve got a totally — they’re treated totally differently, and their ideas are advanced on shows like Lou Dobbs, which come on during dinner time. [emp mine]

Noam Chomsky, speaking on April 17th’s Democracy Now! when asked about ‘hope for the future’:

I have a slightly more hopeful sense than Howard [Zinn] at least expressed, I suspect he agrees. It’s true that the country, that in terms of institutional structure – government for the wealthy and so on – there hasn’t been much change in two hundred years but there’s been enormous progress. I mean even in the last 40 years, since the 60s. Many rights have been won – rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations (which is what the environmental movement is about), opposition to aggression is increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s after centuries of European imperialism – no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars; it’s now extended over the whole world, there’s an International Solidarity Movement – the Global Justice movement, which meet annually in the World Social Forum are a completely new phenomenon. It’s true globalization among people, maybe the seeds for the first true International. People from all over the world, all walks of life, many ideas which are right on people’s minds and agenda are in fact being implemented about a participatory society – the kind of work that Michael Albert’s been doing … these are all new things. There’s been lots of bits – nothing’s ever totally new – there are bits and pieces of it in the past but the changes are enormous. And the same with opposition to aggression. After all the Iraq War’s the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, it’s the first one I can think of which was massively protested before it was officially launched. It actually was underway we’ve since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway – but it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that the New York Times lamented that there’s a second superpower – the population. Well you know, that’s significant and I think gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression, we’re now in a period of regression but if you look at the cycle over time, it’s upwards and there’s no limits it can’t reach.

From Traveling in Mark Twain (Richard Bridgman, 1987):

Having long pondered, without resolution, the meaning of what he had observed in his travels through the world, Twain told his old friend and clergyman Joe Twichell, in a letter of July 28, 1904, that at least “a part of each day—or night” the world vanished absolutely for him, leaving him no more than a thought drifting aimlessly in emptiness. At such moments it seemed to him that everything was “NON-EXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing . That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought . And I am that thought.” (MSM , 30).

William Morris, writing in 1894, and published July 16th of that year in Justice:

To sum up then, the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past which would have no serious relation to the life of the present. But the consciousness of revolution stirring amidst our hateful modern society prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crystalizing into a mere railer against ‘progress’ on the one hand, and on the other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root, and thus I became a practical Socialist. (p.382; Penguin’s News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ‘How I became a Socialist’)

Henry Chadwick: Envoi: On Taking Leave of Antiquity in The Oxford History of the Roman World (1986)

Yet, even the barbarian invasions of the 5th Century AD fail to mark a decisive ending to the structures and values of classical Greece and Rome. If by ‘the end of the ancient world’ we mean the loss of a uniquely privileged position for Greek and Latin classics in western education and culture, then the shift cannot be described as decisive until the 20th Century, an age in which powerful forces inimical to the very notion of a ‘classic’ of the past providing a model or criterion of judgement over the present. Even as the 20th Century draws to a close, the continued centrality of Rome and of the old Mediterranean world retains at least one living and undiminished symbol in the Papacy, presiding over a community of more than 700 million people, most of whom do not live in Europe. Until very recent times the renewal of high culture in the West has been linked with some direct contact with the prime sources of this culture in antiquity: in Greek philosophy, in Roman law and administration, in the universalism stremming from biblical monotheism.

That is not to say that these three main sources are, or were at the time felt to be, wholly harmonious and co-operative friends. The Romans, from Cicero to Pope Gregory the Great, regarded the Greeks as too clever to be honest. The Greeks, as is clear from Plutarch, admired the Romans, but did not greatly appreciate being conquered by them and would have preferred their own incompetent government to Roman efficiency and justice. Christian monotheism represented a disruptive challenge to immemorial local cults and social customs throughout the Empire, and was met by vigorous resistance in the form of philosophic criticism and state harassment.

John Ralston Saul: The Doubter’s Companion (1994):

From the entry on Taste:

In late Imperial Rome, the great aristocratic pagan families were horrified by the rise to power of the lower-middle-class Christians whose churches were so plain and ugly that they were scarcely more than hovels. These rustic believers knew nothing about architectural principles and, we can surmise, had heavy accents and dressed without style. No doubt they were what those with taste would call common. Gradually, however, the aristocrats themselves followed the odor of shifting power and began to convert. Eventually the law left them no choice. It was probably a few generations before they actually thought of themselves as Christian, but in the meantime they brought taste to the church: architecture, decoration, mosaics, painting, liturgy, music. At last the bishops began to wear chasubles as magnificent as their positions. At last the bishops began to sound elegant and powerful. The beauty that resulted from the participation of the great old imperial families became an integral part of our pleasure in ourselves as civilized people. The new pagan Christian taste was quickly confused with the original Christian message of moral clarity. But those links were and remain purely imaginary.

Civilization

The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word `language`. This is not to suggest that images or music are of a lesser importance. It is simply that they have more to do with the unconscious. They are somehow part of metaphysics and religion. Civilization, if it means something concrete, is the conscious but unprogrammed mechanism by which humans communicate. And through communication they live with each other, think, create and act.

Western Civilization
This phenomenon is particularly aggressive about its superiority. Even among themselves Westerners are constantly asserting that they have the best religion, language, method of government or production. They can’t wait to tell people everywhere in the world how to dress, pray, raise their children and organize their cities.

Non-Westerners are at first charmed, then paralyzed by our insistent self-assurance. And when, a decade later, our reorganization of cities such as Bangkok has led to disaster or of most African economies to famine and urban poverty, they find themselves pressured to take Western advice on how to get out of their mess.

What makes us such know-it-all busybodies? Christianity? The deformation of Christianity? These are just four among the dozens of standard and contradictory explanations.

It may simply be that we have not got over being the Barbarians. Indeed our problem has never been the fall of the Roman Empire but, with a few Italian exceptions, that we are not the Romans, who felt the same way about not being the Greeks.

Western history harps on about the growing reliance of the degenerate Romans upon the virile Barbarians to man their armies. So virile that we eventually sacked Rome and took it over. This interpretation leaves the impression that Rome was filled with overweight people lying about in a drunken stupor or fornicating. We tend to skip over the high, and from a Christian point of view, positive civilization into which Rome had evolved. Even a glance at the 5th Century mosaics of Ravenna shows a level of artistic skill which we, the Barbarians, saw, admired, but were unable to absorb. And so it was lost for a 1000 years. We may have conquered Rome, but we remained bumpkins. As documents of the time indicate, we were treated as such by the elites of the Empire.

Charlemagne was not simply claiming historic legitimacy when he had himself crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day of the year 800. He was giving in to his own colonial emotions by claiming the status of those who had been superior to his people. As with the classic nouveau riche, he had succeeded in his own terms but felt obliged to wrap himself in the trappings of the things he could never be. Charlemagne was the great king of a large but backward tribe called the Franks. He wasn’t a Roman emperor. He was a Barbarian.

The long see-saw battle among the tribes of Europe over the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor continued this seemingly indigestible inferiority complex. In its wake, German and Russian kings declared themselves Caesar (Kaiser, Czar). In our own century [20th] the Roman overlord past has been repeatedly claimed by dictators and democrats.

In any case, for the last half-century this sort of squabbling has been over the illusion of appearances. After all, the reality of power had slipped away from the three European tribes and moved on to North America, yet another step removed from Rome. The inferiority complex followed in a cumulative manner.

No country has more imitated Roman architecture ad mannerisms than the United States. An early identification with the honest but militaristic ideal of Cincinnatus quickly declined into a taste for ‘triumphs’ and ‘bread and circuses’. George Washington would have been horrified, but he was dead when Congress had him sculpted, larger than life, as Zeus dispensing liberty. Why Zeus would dispense liberty isn’t clear, except to provide mythological legitimacy.

As the American dream gradually falters, so the sense of national superiority asserts itself with a growing reliance on Roman-style trappings of power. The most obvious element is a weakened emperor who today surrounds himself with more than 1000 personal advisers. This is what the Romans called a praetorian guard. It follows that as government officials leave for the airport from their Washington houses, which are fully equipped with alarms and window-bars to protect them against their fellow-citizens, it is to tell non-Americans, rich and poor around the world, that they ought to be doing things the American way.