From Juxtapoz, Oct 2007 n81 (pages 60;64):
William Buzzell: A lot of people move to NYC and end up staying there the rest of their lives, but you haven’t fit that mold.
AJ Fosik: Well, I had an idealized version when I moved to NYC, too; that it would be this great artist community and that there would be so much going on. But NYC is a really, really difficult place for an artist to live. I think that whole mythology of being able to live in NYC as an artist isn’t really relevant anymore. Everyone I know there works 9-to-5 jobs and pays way too much for an apartment and can’t really function creatively.
WB: But you feel that you can function more creatively in places like San Diego or Denver?
AF: I don’t really have to have a real job here, so that’s a big part of it. It’s pretty much the same reason you live in Philly.
WB: But I also started hating NYC towards the end of living there, and not even just in terms of money. I got really burnt out on NYC, and I think you did too.
AF: Definitely. I go to NYC now and there’s lots of things I love about it, but it’s just way too scenstery there. It doesn’t feel like any organic art scene really exists.
WB: I kind of feel that all of our friends there are turning into the cast of Sex and the City.
~
From Journal, 2 August 2007:
The bar was customered by CityTV folk, and I noticed the fellow from the Space station having an afterwork drink. Hanging around Queen & John at 5.30 is a great way I guess to stalk CityTV/MM/Etc personalities. I ate fries and chicken wings since I was in no mood for something healthy. Conversation with N was nice as usual. We went to the opening at Diaz – sculpture – and I wasn’t approached by anybody friendly. That opening more than most reminded me of Sex in the City: the pretentious glamour of standing around drinking bad wine out of plastic cups, as if this is somehow superior to god knows what else. N and I escaped through the emergency exit, which I coincidentally happened to be standing in front of. Walked to the KM opening, which was also dismal.
Art Aloud: The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Lecture Series 2007
In partnership with the Ontario College of Art & Design
The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2007 Lecture Series encourages discussions, dialogue and discourse leading up to the night of event. With participation from local and international artists from various mediums involved in Scotiabank Nuit Blanche these are sure to be lively and thought-provoking conversations.
All Scotiabank Nuit Blanche lectures are free. Admission is first-come, first-served. Space is limited. For more details email: scotiabanknuitblanche@toronto.ca
Thursday September 27
Panel Discussion
6:30-8:30 pm
Ontario College of Art & Design
100 McCaul St
Auditorium, Level 1
How does the twelve-hour duration of Nuit Blanche influence the artistic process, and what is the nature of an event that is impermanent and ephemeral? Featuring local, national and international artists and gallerists, this panel will address urban space, public art and site-specificity.
Moderated by Toronto Star urban issues reporter Christopher Hume.
Panellists include:
Sara Graham: As a Toronto-based artist Sara Graham’s practice centres on explorations of geographic fictions that blur the disciplines of art, architecture, urban design and geography.
Millie Chen: An active member of a number of artist-run organizations, Millie Chen’s practice encompasses collaborative interdisciplinary projects that engage the public and public space.
Adad Hannah: Based in Montreal, Adad Hannah works in video and photography.
Dyan Marie: Artist and gallerist Dyan Marie explores urban issues, ideas and reflections on contemporary cultural experience. Dyan Marie Projects focuses her curatorial and artistic practices on the Lansdowne and Dupont neighbourhood where she lives.
Craig Walsh: Based in Brisbane, Australia, Craig Walsh is primarily interested in hybrid / site-specific projects and the exploration of alternative contexts for contemporary art, often utilizing projection in response to existing environments and contexts.
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)
The Case of MB
On 25 November 2006, a Montreal blogger posts the following on his site. Although many of us know exactly who the characters involved are, because of the subsequent legal action I’ve decided it’s best to remove the names. Our Montreal blogger will be referred to below as MB.
Howdy!
According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.
This might even be a better story than [C].
This was basically a link-out to an article in the National Post which had been published the day before. The article was about A, a car dealer who police claimed was involved with a crime family. Word on the street had it that B was a business partner with A, and that A had stolen paintings from B, as B is a gallery owner. B was actually in business with A’s wife, not A himself.
The subsequent legal action mentioned above was that B sued MB for defamation, because of the above post. Let’s read it again:
According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec.
According the National Post article, A was in business with B, and B tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. This relates to an even older story from 2003, and is of little consequence here. The defamation in question comes about in the following sentence:
Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.
By beginning his sentence with ‘Because of him’ the implication is that he’s referring to the last person named in the previous statement (B) when in fact he’s referring to A. This leads to the legal action, which is initiated in April, when Mr. MB received the first cease-and-desist notification, which apparently asked for the post to be corrected, clarified, or deleted.
My sense is that complying would have been reasonable, except that MB got his back up about it all and ended up deleting his blog. All because of an unclear sentence structure, and the use of the controversy for a relentless self-promotion campaign of interviews with mainstream media organizations.
Fueled by claims of censorship and a lack of free speech, the angle was always that of the little guy being bullied by people with enough money to afford to drag the matter before the courts. This publicity simply exacerbated the situation.
Again, this is simply the result of bad writing, and the real lesson here is not one of censorship, but that one should be clear about one’s references. MB was simply trying to summarize something that had been published by a national newspaper, but in doing so implied not only an association with the party being investigated by police, but the actual offenses supposedly perpetrated by that person. B had every right to ask for the posting to be clarified or deleted.
Email
A book has now been published as a manual for email, and in it’s review, Janet Malcolm quotes the following examples, described as the correspondence between an executive ‘at a large American company in China’ and his secretary:
You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support.
To which the secretary replied:
I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even though I’m your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it’s someone else’s fault.
Her reply was cc’d to everyone in the company. ‘Before long,’ write Malcolm, ‘the exchange appeared in the Chinese press and led to the executive’s resignation’.
I’m glad to see the executive ended up losing his position, not the secretary. But again, this is the result of bad writing. The executive was probably ignorant of the tone he was conveying with his sentences. His use of the word ‘you’ four times, and the condensation of his instructions into two sentences comes across as curt and unfeeling. The secretary reads it as such, and accuses him of being impolite.
The executive, having risen to the top of ‘a large American company’ must be well versed in the technocratic language of our time. His secretary made the reasonable assumption that he had the wherewithal to carry his own keys, and I’m making the assumption that he’s illiterate – not in the sense that he cannot read or write, but in the sense that he’s not conscious of the effect of his (or the) written word. But then again, one email is not enough to go on for that conclusion: he may have been having a bad day, he may have already been angry about something else, he may have had a company wide reputation for being an asshole to begin with and so on.
Another example from the review clearly implies the executive in question is an asshole:
In this case, the secretary spilled ketchup on the boss’s trousers, and he wrote an email asking for the £4 it cost to have the trousers cleaned (the company was a British law firm). Receiving no reply, he pursued the matter. Finally he—and hundreds of people at the firm—received this email:
Subject: Re: Ketchup trousers
With reference to the email below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.
I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.
Having already spoken to and shown your email…to various partners, lawyers and trainees…, they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the £4.
I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon. Jenny.
Considering my subject here is what is conveyed by writing, I want to point out that both of these examples convey that the top of the corporate pyramid is inhabited by less-than-human individuals, both male, and both wanting to defer responsibility to their female underlings. One could have clearly carried his keys, while the other could have clearly afforded to cover the cost of cleaning his pants. It is precisely this type of basic inconsideration which fuels the protests against globalized capitalism.
Do Not Consume
My third example comes from a story reported last spring, in which Health Canada attempted to warn people not to drink the water on certain Native reservations. (I’m disgusted by the need to write that sentence, btw: ‘bad water on native reservations’. What century am I living in?)
As reported on the CBC website in May:
Health Canada says it plans to revamp its communication strategy about drinking water in aboriginal communities after finding out that its warning ads are not working.Federal Health Minister Tony Clement said Thursday a study has found that its public service announcements, which come in the form of signs and posters, are not clear or effective.
“You live and learn in these things,” Clement said in Ottawa.
Because it was too hard to write, ‘Don’t drink the water’ (that would have been too human, too unprofessional) the signs were written thus:
Do Not Consume Advisory ‘According to the study,’ (study!) CBC reported, ‘residents did not know if the sign referred to their tap water or if the advisory was just a suggestion’.This links back to the example of the executive in China. Corporate language has to be cold, unfeeling, imprecise, technical. The technical aspect is the most important, because it conveys the delusion that one is scientific, and as John Ralston Saul argued with Voltaire’s Bastards, we live within the social cult of Reason. Everything should be as emotionless as an equation.Saul wrote in The Unconscious Civilization (p. 48-49):
In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning, although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.
(Think of how MB is complaining of being censored, when he apparently couldn’t see how his sentence structure could be so misconstrued).
I would put it this way. Our language has been separated into two parts. There is public language – enormous, rich, varied and more or less powerless. Then there is corporatist language, attached to power and action.
(Do Not Consume Advisory)
Corproratist language itself breaks down into three types. Rhetoric, propaganda and dialect. […] For the moment let’s concentrate on dialects. Not the old-fashioned regional dialects, but the specialized, inward looking verbal mechanisms (I’m avoiding the word language because they are not language; they do not communicate) of the tens of thousands of monopolies of fractured knowledge. These are what I would call the dialects of the individual corporations. The social science dialects, the medical dialects, the science dialects, the linguist dialects, the artist dialects. Thousands and thousands of them, purposely impenetrable to the non-expert, with thick defensive walls that protect each corporation’s sense of importance. […]
The reliance on specialist dialects, indeed the requirement to use [them], has become a universal condition of our contemporary elites. …
But the core of the disease is perhaps to be found in the social sciences. These often well-intentioned, potentially useful false [emp mine] sciences feed the dialects of the public and private sectors. […] Economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitate scientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but above all, through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects. As in business and governmental corporations, the purpose of such obscure language could be reduced to the following formula: obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance.
Obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance: Don’t Drink the Water.
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’)
———————-From Karl Polanyi’s, The Great Transformation (1944; p.5-7) with highlights:
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.
The Deaths of Caesar
Vincenzo Camuccini, Cesar Sa Mort (1798)
Jean-Leon Gerome, Death of Caesar (1867) 
Death of Caesar, from video series Empire, (2005) 
Death of Caesar, from video series Rome, (2005) The assassination of GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR took place on 15 March 710 A.U.C in the Curia of Pompey’s Theatre. This was the temporary meeting place of the Senate, since the favored location, The Curia Hostilla had burnt down and was being reconstructed, which would become known as the Curia Jullia. 
The interior of the Curia Julia today (from Flickr) After the event two thousand and fifty years ago, Cicero wrote to L. Minucius Basilus:
I congratulate you. I am wild with delight. I love you and am watching over your interests. I want you to send me in return your love and an account of what you are doing and of all that is going on.
This was a note sent in excitement to Basilus, who would be killed by one of his slaves the following year, who he had punished with mutilation. Basilus had been a solider under Caesar in Gaul, and expected a province to be given him by the dictator. Caesar instead paid him what must have been a large sum of money, and this soured him against the Tyrant and so he joined the conspiracy.
Two days later (on the 17th) Cicero writes to Brutus and Cassius
I learned yesterday evening from Hirtius that Antony is disposed to play us false, pretending that the hostility of the soldiers and of the mob makes it unsafe for us to stay in Rome. So I have applied for liberae legationes for us, but do not expect to get them and fear the worst. So I think we should retire into exile, as we cannot well resort to force, having no rallying point. Let me know your views and where to meet you.
PS After a second talk with Hirtius I determined to ask leave for us to live in Rome with a guard.
The Roman Mob, which made it unsafe for the Conspirators, had burned the site of the deed, although it is not clear when exactly this took place. The transformation of the Hostilla into the Julia wouldn’t be complete for another fifteen years.
The Addresses of Cicero
Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, (1882-1888) 
Cicero announces Octavian, from video series Rome (2007)
