This Goodreads is in part of confession of ignorance, and how wonderful things can be when you don’t have the full picture. Which is to say, they’re fantastic when not dulled by the acquired cynicism of ‘an inside story’. And perhaps it is by coming to the experience initially ignorant, having that wonderful first impression, that the further nuance associated with it doesn’t diminish its glow.
Two of the items discussed here refer to art exhibitions on in Toronto presently, which is to encourage any of you for whom it is possible to visit them.
These four fantastics are presented in the order in which I experienced them.
I. Fantastic One | Darren O’Donnell at CCL1
Darren O’Donnell’s work over the past couple of years has been fantastic. His Suicide Site Guide to the City wowed me when I saw it in 2005, and apparently this was because of the ignorance mentioned above, as Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote in his review at the time ‘…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation’. I admitted in my review that I was one of such an audience. Yet, how could we not appreciate Haircuts by Children or Ballroom Dancing for Nuit Blanche?
In an arts scene riven by competition and jealousies, Darren’s work is something that we all seem to appreciate without such pettiness. I recently attended the latest production from his theatre company, Diplomatic Immunities: THE END and was genuinely touched: Ulysses Castellanos singing Queen’s `We are the Champions` at the end of the show almost made me cry. This was the song voted on by children at a local school to be that which they wanted to hear at the End of the World. (My vote at the present time is either The Beatles’ `Tomorrow Never Knows` or `Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)` and as I listen to them nowadays I imagine it playing over the footage of this video.)
But what is it about Darren’s work along these lines that is so generally fantastic? For me it highlights what is perhaps a greater shift in our culture, which is a movement toward an interest in ‘real life’ (and to that end, reality-tv represents this transition, by using non-actors but still tying them to some sort of narrative structure). The work of Darren’s theatre troupe, Mammalian Diving Reflex, forgoes an explicit narrative structure and seemingly let’s that emerge on it’s own.
Here, I’m most inspired by a snippet of dialogue from a Star Trek show. In the Enterprise episode ‘Dear Doctor’ which first aired in January 2002, there’s a scene depicting movie-night on the starship; while watching ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ a 1943 film being shown in that time-frame of 209 years from its creation, the character Ensign Cutler asks the alien Doctor Phlox, ‘They don’t have movies where you come from do they?’ He replied, ‘We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discovered their real lives were more interesting’.
Now, imagine living on Phlox’s planet during that time of transition, when people were discovering their own lives were more interesting. Wouldn’t that time resemble our own, with diminishing box office returns, reality-tv programing undermining celebrity culture, a global communications network allowing for unedited dialogue within varying degrees of privacy, and the rise of the documentary genre in popularity?
This statement was typed out initially by a scriptwriter in Los Angeles at the beginning of this decade and perhaps was meant both as an inside joke to Star Trek’s fanbase (Shatner’s ‘Get a Life‘ skit from his 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live) and reflecting the concern of Hollywood that they would lose their market. Three years later, Enterprise was cancelled, the only franchise since its resurrection twenty years ago to not last through seven seasons.
Leaving DI: The End four weeks ago I was convinced that our own lives were definitely more interesting. The performance incorporated an element of chance in its selection of two audience members during the course of the evening for interviews by the cast and attendees; on the night I was there, I was stunned by the answers given by the second girl chosen, who told us of saving the life of one of her friends during a climbing accident years before. Also, when asked a question along the lines of ‘why are we here’ she gave such an unexpectedly Buddhist/Eastern Tradition answer that I found myself saying ‘wow’.
The point made for me was that this girl, who had simply been someone sitting in the aisle in front of me, had a much more dramatic world inside her than anything I’m ever offered by fictional constructions, and I took this knowledge onto the street, walking with my companion who was someone new in my life and hence still full of mystery, and saw everyone around me with a new appreciation for our variety, our potential, and of the unknown masterpieces of real life.
This past Thursday, I attended Darren’s opening at The Centre of Leisure and Culture No. 1, Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India which consists of an approximately twenty-minute video and chapbooks of the blog Darren kept while on tour in Pakistan and India late last year. I’ve prompted Darren to place this video online eventually, and if and when that happens I’ll follow through with the link.
At the time of Darren’s trip, I was moved to contact CBC’s The Current because I’d recently heard an interview (begins at 7:45min) with the 24 year old Afghani woman Mehria Azizi who was doing a tour through Canada showing a documentary she’d made about women’s lives in her homeland. This had been one of the more insightful things I’d been exposed to with regard to this part of the world. I imagined Anna Maria Tremonti asking Darren about his conversation with Mike the soldier on the plane, or asking for stories from Darren’s experience with the humanity of these people. I figured it would have fit into The Current’s mandate as I understood it: to educate, to inform, to bring us perspective. Darren’s work deserved this national audience. There was a bit of a followup from someone who was going to forward the info to a producer but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, due to the unreliableness of the CBC’s internet stream, and what I see as too much focus on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, I’ve avoided listening to The Current at work for the past couple of months, preferring instead France Culture or the BBC. I did catch the broadcast the other day of their self-flagellation on under and mis-reporting the story of Global Warming. Anna Maria was somewhat bothered by a statement of one of the scientists: ‘never underestimate the illiteracy of reporters’.
The following morning, (that of March 9th) the CBC included in its news roundup the visit by Canada’s Governor General to the troops in Afghanistan, and there was something said about ‘putting a human face’ on the story (mov and realmedia). What’s unfortunate is that Michaëlle Jean, who in the past has seemed an intelligent, well informed woman, was responsible for the stupidest statements in the report. ‘There’s no future without women …’. No shit. But perhaps the real fault lies with the editors of the video, or the fact that she used to be a reporter.
The evening before I’d been to Darren’s show to see the Pakistan video, the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit. My understanding of the situation and of the people involved has been greatly enhanced by Darren’s first-person and personal reporting and the fact that the CBC found him fit only for their hipster-oriented Definitely Not the Opera kind of suggests how little they take his work seriously … something silly for the kids right?
II. Fantastic Two | Monks in the lab
I watched/listened to this video on Friday at work, and it was fantastic. I especially liked the idea that the effect of mediation was to practice (and thus grow new neurons) paying attention to autonomic processes, which allows us to have greater awareness of our emotions and perceptions, so that we do not need to find ourselves ‘out of control’ or ’swept away’ by strong impulses. In my dream of the future, I want children to be taught meditation in kindergarten, as an essential life skill, just as much as doing your physical exercises and learning your maths.
As I’ve noted about Darren’s work, that it seems to miraculously inspire more admiration than jealousy, the work of Zin Taylor could be accused of inspiring more jealousy than admiration. Consider the facts as they appear: part of the Guelph university educated elite clique, he gets to be in show after show in prestigious galleries with work that is sometimes weak (the piece at The Power Plant in 2005 for example) and Taylor’s continual presence in the Toronto art scene PR seems to be attempting to break the record established by Derek Sullivan. Both artists appear to have been elevated to that collection of what seems like the less than ten artists who are overexposed in Toronto and who are continually asked to ‘represent’ this city of millions to others and to itself.
And so it was with ambivalence that I went down to the YYZ opening on Friday night; a chance to drink beer, be social, see some people I like to talk to and consider friends, and be ignored by those who used to say hi to me but now just think I’m an asshole or something. I wasn’t at all expecting Taylor’s video to win me over as it did, and it is now on my highly recommended list.
And yet, my appreciation for this work was based on my ignorance of its subject matter. I recall seeing years ago the call for submissions from the Yukon asking for artists to come on up and be inspired. I also recall hearing that Allyson and Zin, two artists I’d recently met through a friend, had been chosen to go. And so I knew over the past few years that Allyson and Zin had a connection to the Yukon and that they were making work about it.
With Put your eye in your mouth (which a friend suggested meant ‘digest what you see’) Zin has made a sort of fake documentary on a fake thing: Martin Kippenberger’s metro-net station in Dawson City. Now, my ignorance here was based on being familiar with Kippenberger’s name but not his work, so when watching the video, I thought Zin had seen this structure and made up an elaborate history for it, tying it to some art-star’s name in order to get in the trendy props to the masters. Turns out the Metro-Net was legit (also here), and yet this only diminishes by a bit the overall video, which is still fantastic. It is this type of elaborated imagination that I want to experience with art, and in as much that conceptual art usually goes for obscure one-liner cleverness, I hate it for its denial of the imagination. Now, considering Taylor’s background from Canada’s new conceptual It-School, I suppose I can say he’s showing that you can be both conceptual and imaginative, and the product is better for it.
IV. Fantastic Four | Kuchma’s Thrush Holmes reviews
The suspicions I had of Zin Taylor’s elaborate imagining of what could have been ‘the mine-shaft entrance’ follows on January’s suspicions that the opening of Thrush Holmes Empire was part of an elaborate joke.
There’s been talk in the scene of it being some kind of hoax, and personally I thought this was the case. I was trying to keep my mouth shut about it all, not wanting to ruin it, but now that I’ve been assured that this is not a masterpiece-parody on the art world constructed by Jade Rude and Andrew Harwood (the co-directors of the Empire space) (’they’re not that clever’ I was told), I guess I share my disappointment that this really is the work of a presumptuous and pretentious young man who makes terrible work. As I said at the opening in January, ‘if this work is a parody, it’s a masterpiece, but if it’s legit I feel sorry for the guy’. In other words, in my ignorance, I imagined a fantastic scenario in which Jade and Andrew had collaborated on making quick, easy, and lazy work to fill up wall space in time for the opening, and hired an actor to play Thrush Holmes (which plays too close to the great 90’s indie-rock band Thrush Hermit). No mother names their son Thrush, so whoever this guy is, his wallet certainly doesn’t contain ID linking him closely with Joel Plaskett’s 90s project.
(A Thrush Hermit Aside
Seeing Ian McGettigan cover The Wire’s ‘I am the Fly’ in 1999 was part of the reason I gave up watching live music once I moved to Toronto – nothing would ever top that, and I prefer to have my indie-music memories packaged around my experience in Halifax rather than have continued on with the ringing ears of today’s stuff. Even though that meant I missed out on seeing the shit like this live).
The only person who seems to be addressing this Thrush Holmes issue is Michael Kuchma.
As I mentioned in the last Goodreads, I was part of a panel discussion at Toronto’s Gallery 1313 on art criticism. I had a good time and it was well attended despite being both a Monday and the weather being less than conducive to a social gathering. (The event was recorded and will potentially be made available as a podcast, and if/when that happens I’ll send out a link). During the Q&A, I was asked a question from a fellow in the audience who later identified himself via a comment on the BlogTo blurb writen by fellow panelist Carrie Young the day after.
Michael Kuchma is trying to write some thoughtful criticism about the Toronto scene and I glad that I was able to learn about it through these circumstances. I appreciate his take not only on the Thrush Holmes stuff but also on the Toronto scene in general, and I also appreciate seeing the influence of the panel talk in his writing: I guess it was worth something in in the end.
In the second link (’why we Should…’) make note of point number 3:
Perhaps some fear that Holmes is orchestrating a brilliant art-stunt, and that passing judgment right now puts one in the vulnerable position of looking stoooopid and hasty on the day when Holmes comes clean with his Machiavellian master plan.
This is pretty much why I’ve kept quiet for this long, not wanting to ruin for everybody, and wanting to see Garry Michael Dault embarrassed for ‘falling for it’ as he had a positive review in the Globe & Mail on the day after the opening. (Why would I like to see Dault with egg on his face? Because Dault’s work as a critic is worthless – his reviews are almost always positive, unless he dares insinuate that someone has skills, at which point they are dismissed as being ‘illustrative’). A hoax or not, Kuchma’s thoughts on the whole matter are the most substantial I’ve come across and I’m glad he’s putting them out there.
Over the past three weeks I’ve been reading Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, which I learned of by way of Darren O’Donnell’s ‘darren-in-pakistan‘ blog (speciffically this posting) and I was actually inclined to read it. With regards to Empire I’ve had the same attitude that Noam Chomsky expressed about it here:
QUESTION: It seems to me, with a certain degree of difference, that the concept of a virtual senate is similar to Negri’s and Hardt’s concept of Empire. [Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)]
CHOMSKY: Empire, yes, but I have to say I found it hard to read. I understood only parts, and what I understood seemed to me pretty well known and expressible much more simply. However, maybe I missed something important.
QUESTION: Yes, and the book arrives to the same conclusion as yours but through a more complicated, less readable way…
CHOMSKY: If people get something out of it, it’s okay. What I understand seems to be pretty simple, and this is not a criticism. I don’t see any need to say in a complicated way what you can say in an easier way. You can make things look complicated, that’s part of the game that intellectuals play; things must look complicated. You might not be conscious about that, but it’s a way of gaining prestige, power and influence.
I’ve thus carried a prejudice toward Hardt & Negri’s work over the past few years, but something in the way Darren introduced it intrigued me; further web-reaserch led me to believe it was the type of thing I should read since it elaborated on what I’ve been personally calling the politics of variety.
I can’t say I totally agree with all of it – but I was open to its analysis. Getting through the first section was difficult – I don’t feel like I’m living in a Global State of War as much as I feel I’m living in a culture of propaganda continually devoted to telling me some asshole blew up some other assholes somewhere I have no plans of visiting.
My own understanding of American Empire is largely metaphorical – I agree with the premise of Empire but my feeling is that they administrations of the Western world’s nation-states don’t know what they’re doing in that regard – they are too incompetent. In other words, while academics can diagnose and Imperial condition, the reality is that the Western governments are in denial.
The ending, focusing on the democratic project of multitude, seems to elevate multitude to the sovereignty they wish to deconstruct. It also seeks to abolish all authoritarian structures with the aim of having an anarchist state ruled by the common interest and affective (‘niceness work’ one could call it) labour of the multitude – the network of individual interests.
What seems lacking is a recognition of the capitalist market as it exists as a form of multitude already self-organizing – but I know that’s such a faux pas to even mention it. As well, there seems to be a lack of acknowledgment of the substantial work that would need to be undertaken to ‘phase in’ the current mainstream mass of corporate workers and other people who don’t read, don’t think, and have no real capacity to function as they are within such a democratic society. In other words, how does one prevent the democratic multitude from being merely an autocracy of cliques? Such cliques would be identified as knowing who Hardt & Negri even are, as opposed to the mainstream, which is more preoccupied this weekend with Brittany Spears’ new haircut.
I. But first, let’s imagine how we might be thought of in the future.
The Modern, Nodern, Oddern, Podern, and Qodern Periods
The predominance of using the prefix ‘post’ to name a period (almost always the one in which people found themselves at the time) flourished in the first decade of the 21st Century, and as one writer noted, ‘everything is posts … I need a saw to cut them down, too see the horizon’. Recognizing the Modern period as being the one which encompassed most of the 20th Century, one that was clearly defined, it followed that one should simply used the letters of the alphabet to replace the ‘post’ fashion, and hence, post-modernism was renamed the Nodern, and post-post-modernism was renamed the Oddern (although it is notable that post-post-modernism was never as popular, and many people were confused by this point not knowing exactly what time they were living in).
The first decade of the 21st Century, according to the historical records, referred to its self variously as:
‘post-nine-eleven’
‘post-national’
‘post-modern’ (or shortened to ‘pomo’)
‘post-post-modern’
‘post-industrial’
‘post-agrarian’
The Nodern Period
The Nodern was once known as the ‘post-modern’ and characterized the time between, roughly, 1975-1995. Since it saw itself as a movement that put Modernism behind it, it is perhaps explained best by looking at how it saw Modernism. As the overall paradigm of the 20th Century, Modernism defined how human beings in the West saw both themselves and their creative works. It created neat categories to enable definition, but in the language of the late 20th Century’s marketing, ‘post-modernism’ was about ‘thinking outside the box’.
It’s language emphasized the prefix ‘meta’ meaning ‘overarching’ and so, Post-Modernist/Nodernist talk refers to ‘metanarratives’. The most famous definition of what it meant to be beyond Modernism was to see ‘metanaratives’ as unbelievable.
The privileging of one story as had been the case under Modernism came into question, and the Nodern began to look into the as yet untold stories. Although, it is also necessary to point out the Western centric dominance of this vision, as the so-called untold stories were simply untold by Western thinkers to a Western audience. The Nodernist thinkers, while claiming to be on the side of the ‘non-west’ really saw themselves as deeply involved in the Western tradition that goes back to Latin Classicism.
The Nodern period was also characterized by a dominant political ideology that attempted to recast human life in simple economic terms. The politics of the time were characterized by an overall concern with ‘lowering trade barriers’ with the belief that such action would improve human life across the globe, and while misguided in the extreme, represents the first stirrings of a globalized mono-culture, one that began to develop with the increased capacity of telecommunication technology and the ease of global travel in the late 20th Century. The unbelief in One-Story (metanarrative) was fostered by the evidence that there were an extraordinary variety of stories that people could pick and choose from in order to lead richer lives.
Noism
Cultural historians often joke that the Nodern refers to ‘nothing good came out of it’. The clash between the tradition dating back to Ancient Rome in the West, and the confrontation with an global political and cultural tradition, reminiscent of empires (especially those of 19th Century Europe) caused much confusion and is one of the reasons the joke came about. It is best seen as a highly concentrated period of upheaval and transition, and it is sometimes popularly called Nomo.
This has prompted some contemporary culturalists to claim they are Noists, with the Toronto group The No-no Things being perhaps the best well known. In this way, they claim to be the fulfillment of the 20th Century avant-garde project (which the Nodern claimed to be the height of at the time) as the 20th Century Dadaists were named after the Russian term for ‘yes’ – ‘da’. Hence, answering the Dadaists nonsensical Yes Yes with their highly contrived and intellectual No No. It is notable to point out that Noism is highly esoteric and therefore culturally irrelevant within our larger Qodern context.
The Oddern and Podern Period
The six year period between 1995 and 2001 is referred to by historians who use this terminology as the Oddern period, who smirk when they say it was characteristically ‘odd’. The beginning of the end of the globalist ideology manifested itself in a rise of popular protests – first in 1997 against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and most famously, ‘The Battle in Seattle’ in 1999, which was followed by popular protests throughout 2000, culminating in April 2001 in Quebec City. Protests were planned for events that autumn, but the terrorists attacks of 11 September suddenly altered the political dialogue and ended the care-free callousness that had been popular in the developed world since the end of the Cold War ten years before.
The Oddern was also seen to be odd due to the rather sudden blossoming of the internet, which transformed everyone’s lives – henceforth, email and websurfing and stories of ‘dot-com millionaires’ became ordinary, while the politics of the United States focused on the sex-life of the President culminating in an attempted impeachment.
The Podern was so called because P followed O which followed N which followed M; so wrote the historian who coined the term. But a rival school of thought argues that the Podern is specific to the autumn of 2001 when Apple Incoperated introduced the iPod, which became the defining artifact of the time. As the iPod allowed for the assembly and playback of a vast amount of files (which hadn’t been possible before, and the iPod’s storage capacity at the time was unique) it is seen to be an appropriate term for this period since its culture consisted to a large extant of reassembly and recontextualization.
People living during the Podern Period sometimes called this ‘the deejay culture’. The term deejay comes from the acronym, D.J, (disc jockey) those who remixed and assembled playlists of music at nightclubs or on radios. The term jockey goes back to horse racers, hence the sense that this was the one in control. The first radio broadcasters would play a variety of music singles (which at that time consisted of vinyl discs) and with the development of the music-movie (known as ‘music videos’) the term was modified for those who introduced them on television. They were called veejays (‘video jockeys’).
The deejay began to overtake the rockstar in the early 1990s as the appreciable peak of music performance, with the rave dance parties that began in the UK in the 1980s. By the early 90s, the rave had been imported to North America, and by 1995 it was known in the mainstream. Hence, the late 90s, while known as the Oddern, are also referred to by cultural historians at The Early Podern Period. The school which promotes the presence of the Apple iPod device as the defining characteristic of the Podern (rather than merely going with the alphabetical arangement) agrees with this assessment, noting that the iPod’s arrival in 2001 was also the first proper year of the 21st Century, and the year in which the terrorists attacks on the United States occurred, the defining political event of that era.
It was also during this time that ‘classicism’ was re-defined to encompass more that it had previously. During the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, Western centric cultural observers always referred to ‘classical’ as being the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome – defined simply perhaps as ‘the architectural column’. Neo-classicism developed in the late 18th and 19th Century, and at that time referenced the fashion of imitating the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, but neo-classicism was followed by Modernism. By the early 21st Century, Modernism had developed it’s own cannon of ‘classics’ which were then copied, referenced, and imitated in such as way that the sampling and re-assembly of this cannon by the Podernists represented a Modernist neo-classicism. Historians now speak of ‘Latin Classicism’ when referring to the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, and even that of the European Renaissance to the 19th Century Neo-classical period, since what these cultures all have in common (except for the original Greek) is the presence of the Latin language in the culture (either as the vernacular in the earliest, or as the language of European scholarship later on).
The Old Master Painters, who had become unfashionable during Modernism, began to be imitated by a generation of painters in the late 20th Century, and who were then called ‘New Old Masters’ and eventually, New Masters, until that died out and the term ‘Master Painter’ returned to the vocabulary as someone who excels in the craft of image making by hand.
Self-reflection in the Podern Period
The Podern is marked by the terrorist attacks on the United States of America on 11 September 2001, which sparked a flourishing of American militarism, and subsequent wars against Afghanistan during 2001-2002, Iraq in 2003, and Iran in 2007. The international dialogue shifted from one of ‘globalized trade’ (popular during the Nodern) to one of renewed nationalities and cultural identities.
Many at the time were dismayed to see the dialogue revert from that of the late 20th Century’s secular humanism to one that seemed to pit the United States’ version of fundamentalist Christianity against the Middle East’s version of fundamentalist Islam. Centering the dialogue on cultural identity seem to be nothing more than the mainstream catching up to much of the cultural elites preoccupation with what was called ‘identity politics’ during the Nodern’s 1990s, and encouraged self-reflection at all levels during the decade of 2000s.
In television, Dr. Phil was a popular therapy show, (although never had Foucault’s warnings about conformity and madness had a greater example); the show had been an offshoot of the ever-popular eponymous Oprah Winfrey show, which emphasized self-improvement through the ‘tales of personal triumph’ of common people and celebrities, with handy shopping tips thrown in for good measure and promotion. In movies (the dominant art form of the time) self-reflection is emphasized in the films written by Charlie Kaufman: Being John Malkovich (1999) is about seeing the world through some-one else’s eyes (John Malkovich was a popular actor who himself stared in the film). In Adaptation (2002), Kaufman caricatured himself by making a confused scriptwriter part of the story, inventing an identical twin brother to balance his neurotics. In Chad Schmidt (2008), the eponymous character is an actor who has a hard time finding work because he too closely resembles Brad Pitt, the most famous actor of the decade, played by Brad Pitt himself.
In theatre, Darren O’Donnell exemplified this intensive self-reflection with his play A Suicide-Site Guide to the City (2003-2006).
The Qodern Period
Some historians, uncomfortable with the easy explanation of using the alphabet to name the eras, look to the 20th Century’s use of Q to explain the Qodern. The letter Q became very popular in the second-half of the 20th Century, being used as pen-names and as the title of books; in the James Bond film series, Q was the alias of the UK’s Secret Service engineer; in the Star Trek Sagas Q was a mischievous god. The Dutch author Harry Mulisch named the main character in his 1997 novel, The Discovery of Heaven Quinten Quist, whose initials of QQ hinted at his supernatural characteristics. As Mulisch wrote:
‘His initials are Q.Q.’ ‘Qualitate qua,’ nodded Onno. ‘That is rare. The Q is the most mysterious of letters, that circle with that line,’ he said, while he formed a slightly obscene gesture a circle with the manicured thumb and index finger of one hand and the line with the index finger of the other, ‘the ovum being penetrated by a sperm. And twice at that. Very nice. My compliments.’ (p.361)
The contemporary historian Wu Zhenguo identifies the Qodern with that of the Star Trek Sagas‘ character. Noting that Q was seemingly omnipotent, omnitemporal, and omnipowerful he argues that our present society’s capacity for ‘all-awareness’ via the net is an adequate metaphor for our capacities. We may not be able to have things materialize out of thin air with a snap of the fingers, as could Q, but the idea Wu advances is that our capacities through nanotechnology and intercommunication most resembles that of our historical ideas of what only gods were capable of.
In addition, through our Representative technology, we can indeed speak with historical characters, in ways that Q flaunted and that which we were not capable of doing during the Podern.
The Qodern is a time period of psychological health, intensive communication and dialogue. The banes of existence throughout history: poverty and disease, have been eliminated for the most part: all diseases are at least treatable but no longer death sentences, and the lifespan has been extended so that one can afford a greater amount of time reading, thinking, or playing, barring the unfortunate accident of course.
The development of the Podern period began to show people how unprofitable it was to continue to dehumanize any segment of society, and how much better off everyone could be by extending benefits and encapsulating dialogue in a system of rights. While the globalist economic arguments which petered out by the Podern created for a time a sense of confusion, ultimately we look back and see how this time allowed for our new view of society as an engine for creativity and education to emerge. The view that all of us enjoy and benefit from today.
I’ve been so impressed with what WordPress allows me to do with this blog, I applied it to Goodreads, and over the past week worked toward launching a new interface, which I did tonight. I still need to go through and complete the categorization, but that won’t take too much longer. I plan on beginning the podcast feature in March, which won’t be anything too special: simply another and simple way to access the audio content. There are some aspects to the current design I’m unsure of, and they could be modified in the days or weeks ahead.
Last Sunday saw this year’s Superbowl, when the marketing agencies try to wow us into another enthusiastic year of American consumerism. I was in no mood for any of it; in fact, I was rather grumpy last weekend. So when I found Theodore Dalrymple’s intolerant text entitled Freedom and its Discontents in which he expresses thanks for not having to voice on radio his thoughts on the 12 year old Austrian boy who recently had a sex change, I was annoyed and grumpified even more, although I appreciated his perspective. He wrote:
If I had spoken my mind, without let or hindrance, I should have said what I suspect a very large majority of people think: that there is something grotesque, and even repugnant, about the whole idea of sex-changes, let alone of sex-changes for twelve year-olds.
I don’t find the issue repugnant nor do I find it very interesting. Dalrymple goes on to write about how the freedom of expression has been curtailed, not by onerous censorship laws, but by the intolerance of the politically correct. He concludes by writing: ‘Please don’t reply to any part of this article. I won’t read it: I know I’m right.’Those who know they are right are the most exasperating people one ever has to deal with. Stubborn minded fools so set in their ways they don’t even care about appearing to be ignorant, deluded and hateful. Dalrymple’s work nevertheless tends to be a good read because we can learn and gain something from his perspective. He isn’t constrained by an idealism, nor his he constrained by the specialized knowledge that cuts ‘those in the know’ off from the common.
Over my time doing this list, I’ve occasionally received letters taking to task something I wrote in introduction, or questioning my link selection. I thought I would need a defense of Dalyrmple’s article saying basically: don’t shoot the messenger, and began it anticipating this edition. But over the past week, I saw more than one article appear which basically underlines a theme of intolerance. It is one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing with Goodreads, and that is attempting to document through the link selection the occasional popular meme – an idea which seems to be expressed in more than one article appearing simultaneously from different sites.
The greatest example of intolerance in current public/web discussion has to do with the Holocaust, and seems focused on the latent assumption that the next war will be with Iran. There seems to be a lack of appetite in the United States for another invasion, which is a good thing, but churning along underneath the popular sentiment is the attempt by the right-wing blowhards to demonize Iran’s president Ahmadinejad who made the cover of yesterday’s (Feb 10) Globe & Mail. We have been told for months that Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier, because he has said in the past that it was a myth. Out of an extreme generosity and skepticism of North American propaganda, I’ve questioned whether he didn’t mean the anthropological sense of the word, until I remembered referring in recent conversations to consumerism as a myth (meaning it as an inaccurate oversimplification of our economic activity) and I was using the popular form of the word.
To clarify: anthropologically a myth is a story of meaning, one that punches above its weight of accumulated incidents. To say that the Holocaust is a myth under this context I think is accurate. It is has found a high, and defining, place in the Jewish story, and in a world of secularism, it seems that while not all contemporary Jews may believe in their God, they certainly all believe in their near genocide. As a gentile I find the overwhelming presence of the story sometimes noxious, as it has seemed to breed an unhealthy and unproductive paranoia that generates more hatred and anger than peace. And as a gentile I have to be very careful about what I say regarding this historical incident, since there is an element within Judaism who are ready to condemn any one who questions this reality in any way, who seem to think that all gentiles are closeted anti-Semites ready to light up the ovens again if given the chance. The taboo and reverence that is now tied to the Holocaust story is surely mythic in this regard, making condemnable heretics of those who deny.
But popularly, a myth is a fairy-tale, a fiction, and I don’t question the veracity, or the horror of the Shoah. The reality of Holocaust denial fits in perfectly with the stupidity of the age which questions even the Moon landings; such is a healthy skepticism toward the stories of authority taken to an extreme and absurd level. We live at a time when some believe in the literalness of the Bible, that people lived with dinosaurs, and that perhaps Jesus only lived a thousand years ago. It is doubtful that Ahmadinejad is sophisticated enough to mean the anthropological sense of mythology when referring to those events.
But my problem is essentially based on the fact that I have no reason to believe anything I’m ever told by Western governments in general with regard to foreign policy. Since childhood I’ve been told that political leaders on the other side of the planet are generally untrustworthy and/or crazy. And because everything nowadays seems to be about the other side of the planet, I was left with cognitive dissonance when I heard Mike Wallace interview the President of Iran, as he did last August (and available in the two mp3s below). Because Mr. Ahmadinejad sounds saner than my own political leaders.
Wha? I mean, listen closely to the interviews: at one point Ahmadinejad says to Wallace (who prompted him to be more sound-bitey) that all of his questions require book length answers. What North American politician would say such a thing? ‘The problem that President Bush has is that in his mind he wants to solve everything with bombs. The time of The Bomb is in the past, it’s behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue, and cultural exchanges’. Who the fuck said that!?
Now, with props to my culture’s conditioning, who knows if he was just putting on a show of reasonableness for the Western cameras. We are told continually that these foreign leaders are like that: crafty propagandists who seduce our liberal left-wingers with their talk of international justice and wanting to do good things for their people. But we know The Truth, because our warmongering political elite have deemed to tell us The Real Story in between all of the secrets they keep. These leaders in the next hemisphere want to nuke us, they hate our freedom, they’re insane and hateful, unenlightened and ignorant, and they regularly flaunt international laws. They are also undemocratic and barbaric, because their elections are either rigged or the wrong people (Hamas) win. Further, when they execute their past tyrants they don’t do it tastefully.
Worst of all, they’re all anti-Semtic and want to destroy Israel, which is another way of saying they are Latter Day Nazis and thus we’re in another Just War against genocidal fascists. In the midst of this snake pit there is Israel, and the Israeli Cabinet, we need to remember, is along with the Pope and the American President, infallible; all graced by God with the ability to never be wrong about anything.
On Freedom of Expression
As I’ve said, I’m being extremely generous in assuming that Mr. Ahmadinejad could be more intelligent than he is portrayed. But such an example, based on an uncommon view, removes my argument from the realm of shared experience from which we should be debating ideas about free expression. The controversial issues of our time are discussed based on common understanding and misunderstandings, and it’s important that we debate within those limits, rather than resort to extreme examples which make everything hypothetical fast.
Abortion is the example that comes readily to mind – growing up in the 1980s and hearing about Henry Morgentaler in the news, and even once participating in a junior high school debate on the subject, the pro-choice contingent regularly argued for cases of rape, incest, and maternal health concerns as deserving abortions. I haven’t checked out the stats, but I’ll hazard a guess that over 90% of abortions performed in North America have nothing to do with those examples. Common knowledge – which may be ignorant and flawed granted – suggests that most abortions are a form of birth control. To hedge around that by arguing the extremes keeps the debate from really being held in the first place, and thus the camps can remain unconvinced by the other’s position.
American commentators see free speech as a sacrosanct right, and as a result have one of the most intolerant and ignorant cultures on the planet. But that is their self-described right. The United States gift to the world seems to have been the enlarge definition of rights to include the right to degrade, discredit and humiliate oneself to a state of unreserved indignity. Anna Nicole Smith had the good fortune to die this past week to provide me with her example. The idealists of the U.S. make it a point to defend the offensive and vulgar as a part of this right, and perhaps here I shouldn’t remind you that vulgar came from the Latin word for common, as I want to try and elevate the common to think of our common capacity for intelligence and compassion rather than our current and common psychopathologies. It is to this end that we need free expression defended: so that we are able to judge things for ourselves.
Our position in Canada is a more intolerant view on intolerance. We accept limits to free-speech which includes anti-hate speech laws. This is meant to prevent harm, and as I understand it, our Supreme Court allowed this by stating that some forms of speech are not worth defending.
A case in point is Holocaust denial: questioning the interpretation of the evidence is one thing, but what is the motivation behind it? The Jews have a right to mythologize (anthropologically) the story, and why should any of the rest of us care? When did the phrase ‘mind your own business’ fall out of favour? I think I know the answer to my rhetorical question, and it’s basically the one favored by Ahmadinejad and his fellow skeptics, one that prefers to dehumanize Jews with the word ‘Zionist’. I don’t think I need to get into it. I think the point raised by the Supreme Court’s decision is essentially it isn’t worth the debate, and that in fact it could be perceived as harmful to engage in it.
Somehow (and I think this has remained largely unexplained and unexplored) we can enjoy a freedom of expression without regularly crossing the line into hate speech. Seldom is anyone investigated or charged: you really have to make an effort to be that offensive. Or one has to be basically poking a bee’s nest: posting calls for Bush to be assassinated online, creating cartoons of Muhammed as a terrorist and the like. As free expression those examples are a waste of the freedom, since it contributes nothing to a discussion and is really only retrogressively ignorant.
How do we manage to use our freedom of expression productively when and if we do? I think it comes from our appreciation for those who offend in ways that increase our capacity for all of expression by showing us a new idea, a new way of life, and a new way of thinking. But we are wary and even intolerant of those who want to limit our expression, or limit our innate sense of progress toward a better world, through the expression of their retrogressive views. In other words: blowing away a stale old convention and offending conservatives by doing so rocks; bringing about the downfall of civilization with a medieval attitude and mindset does not. Somehow we understand what constitutes this through a language of behavior rooted in our common experience. This is what makes conservatives so defensive: they know when they’ve been beat by a new expression. It used to be rock n’ roll: now it’s their teenagers using abbreviation, emoticons, and chatting online with strangers.
While we are united by a common grammar of speech, so too we are united by a common grammar of behaviour. This has been in the past referred to as bourgeois values and considered worth rebelling against, and thus movements created a type of poetry of misbehavior which expanded our own vocabularies of affect. But within these values is a core set of ideas about how we should treat one another, a common value set which sees the benefit to the whole at the individual’s expense.
Consider littering. Off hand, I’m sure we all agree that littering isn’t really a good thing. We’ll define it as saying it’s the introduction of garbage into a public space meant to be shared by all. We’ll further define garbage as something unwanted by someone. Thus, our definition here of littering is the introduction, of something unwanted, into a public space.
But what if this unwelcome introduction of something unwanted is called art by the litterer? Then it’s an intervention. Then, that cigarette cellophane you just dropped on the sidewalk is a performance. According to the art-rules I should shut up now, because the recontextualization destroys it as litter and makes it a human expression that should be nurtured, encouraged, and supported by art council grants. But here I really want to link littering to graffiti and say that because some people consider it unwelcome it is also a form of littering, but it’s one that I personally support as a human attempt at the beautification of plain (plane?) architecture.
While we all understand why we shouldn’t litter as part of our common knowledge, we also understand the deal with most abortions and why hate-speech could be criminal. We don’t need freedom of expression – or whatever other freedoms we enjoy – to be defended by extreme examples, because all laws, all social agreements, all freedoms exist first as a social convention in common knowledge and it is from this basis that the state feels it has the authority to police them. The fragmentation of our society into specialized interest groups is perhaps where we began to disagree about what should be legal and what shouldn’t be. Our common knowledge – our vulgarity – has been reduced to extreme forms of behavior and reduced in intelligence to something less than our potential making us more undignified than some animals.
The challenge has always been to incorporate the deviant into the conventional: this pattern has always seemed to be about the dominant sanctioning another – minority’s – convention as harmless rather than a sudden revaluation of the dominant’s morals. The arguments raised by Christopher Hitchens in his defense of the ‘freedom of denial’ in essence is of allowing that process to continue: for the dominant to not become so self-satisified that they refuse to consider the other’s point of view. But it also seems that we have reached examples of extreme perspectives that the dominant decided long ago were not sanctionable. Holocaust denial is one, as is sex with kids and animals. The recent Sundance film festival featured a film in which a 12 year old girl was raped, and another was a documentary on bestiality. My thoughts are essentially: do we really need to have that discussion? Are we so intellectually and emotionally bankrupt that we have to resort to those expressions for stimulation? It turns out that no distributor wants to buy the Dakota Fanning movie Hounddog and all I can think is thank god.
Ultimately, this is all about the strangeness of language: how a set of sounds, strung together a certain way, can have such intense psychological and intellectual effects. Words uttered or read can make the heart leap or fall, can be emotionally devastating or immensely uplifting, and it’s all just a bunch of sounds or a bunch of shapes on a surface. Through this, one mind interacts with another and our sense of what’s going in our world – that intersection of imagination and environment – grows until we eventually are changed people: more sophisticated, more learned, more conversant. We have a bigger bag of tricks and fuller experience of life. The freedom of speech is also the freedom to be exposed to ideas that we don’t agree with, so that we aren’t held back from the mysteriously transformative power of hearing or reading words. But a case can be made that some of this has the potential to be retrogressive and counterproductive, making us more stupid. Inasmuch as the state tries to do this for us, they should have better things to do, but I think it is also true that they don’t need to control what we think about things because that’s already done by a televised culture of idiocy. – Timothy
I was indecisive about going to see the Mathew Barney movie, because
I didn’t want to have to kill the time between getting off work and seeing the movie, which would have entailed
the claustrophobia of being stuck in a room, in a seat, in a sold out theatre for two hours, with hipsters
Today I bought
a new bottle of after shave balm which came with a promotional stick of lip balm
a new shaving brush
a new bottle of eye drops
I bought these things on my morning break. For my afternoon break I read
Lee Seigel’s review/historical essay on Norman Mailer’s new book
Norman Mailer and I share a birthday with Justin Timberlake. Justin Timberlake turned
26
in Montreal, where he was singing after performing in Toronto on Tuesday. Today is the third anniversary of the infamous wardrobe malfunction.
Justin Timberlake was born three years earlier than Mailer’s age if we begin to count in 1900; that is, 1981. Norman Mailer turned
84
because he was born in 1923. If you add two to four you get Justin’s 6 and if you take away six from the eight you get the 2. If you take the the two and three and from Mailer’s birth year and flip them around and you get back to the beginning, which is
The opening was fantastic. I was so glad to be there. Toronto’s been too boring for too long. It needed an injection of pompous pretension. Red carpet, open bar and delicately pretty glammed out art girls. Also, I find I’m now of an age when the songs that were hits when I was younger have come ’round again to be hipster favorites. But I’m also confused about who Thrush Holmes is, and I think that’s precisely the point. It wasn’t about the art, it was about the party for the art.
Proust has already come up twice – first in Taylor’s discussion, but also it the title of the Gordon Bell presentation. What better way to introduce Mr. Mee? The truth is I wanted to publish a review of Mr. Mee in the summer of 2005, and it is a novel I read in the summer of 2004, but obviously didn’t get around to it until now. Mr. Mee is a novel of three story-lines, with two of the major players being Rousseau and Proust; Rousseau as a character, and Proust as an idea. It is set a decade ago, in 1997, during the early years of the internet – which is an important element to the fiction. The eponymous character of Mr. Mee is a retired, naive academic who buys a computer in order to use the nascent World Wide Web to try and track down an obscure book. In a Borgesian allusion, Rosier’s Encyclopaedia has been referenced in the bibliography of a book he brought home from a leisurely afternoon at the used bookstore.
Andrew Crumey shifts the scene to tell us more about the Encyclopaedia by bringing us back to 18th Century Paris, and introducing us to two characters, Ferrand and Minard, two down-on-their-luck copyists who are commissioned to copy a bunch of nutty writings by a Mr. Rosier. F & M are named after two people who Rousseau wrote about in his autobiography, and Crumey’s speculation on their backstory, and its consequences were outstanding. This novel is simply intellectually delightful in that regard. Perhaps they had something to do with Rouseau’s famed paranoia? Maybe they thought Rousseau a murderer? And perhaps their paranoia was fueled by their work fair-copying this work of an 18th Century genius who’d thought up 20th Century quantum physics and binary computers in 18th Century terms? (One of my favorite parts of the book describes Minard’s construction of a digita-binary computer out of string and bits of paper, and he is heard to complain about needing more memory. It seems that even in the 1760s, it was desirable to have more RAM).
In the 1990s, a professor lies in a hospital bed, contemplating his life over the past several months, and the possibility of his death. He had been a professor of Proust, and had come to teach this work of autobiographical literature after an adolescent infatuation with the work of Rousseau. And so, as he writes his memoir, he reflects both on Rousseau and on Proust. This is the tour-de-force of the novel. I found this the most satisfying, and appreciated it’s intricate subtleties. The professor comes across as just another dime-a-dozen mediocre academic who live their quotidian lives a students and commentators of past human achievement. The Proust-bug has not yet bitten me, and it was here I learned of how Proust described his magnum opus as being ‘about an I who isn’t I’. The introduction of this thought in the professor’s memoir raises the question of how much of his text is about an I that isn’t he. The overall impression is that, faced with impending death, Dr. Petrie has at last given it a try, written his work of autobiography about and I who isn’t I, inspired by his mastery of knowledge of these two masters of the art. Dr. Petrie ignores whatever sense of failure that has brought him to this point – the broken heart, his cancer, the sense that it was his attempt to initiate an affair with a student which brought on the illness. Instead of being cowed by a sense of mediocrity in comparison to his literary heroes, he gives it a go and in so doing constructs a literature of the self. The added poignancy comes from the embarrassed recounting of the infatuation which he blames for the illness out of a sort of hubris, and it is perhaps through this honest memory that his work becomes literary and becomes the final accomplishment of his life.
And perhaps here it is worth remembering that a year ago, James Frey was in the news for his book of autobiography, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone who claims to run a book club to not understand the need to embellish, to lie, to cheat the details as (what used to be called in a more literate age) poetic license.
Crumey’s skill is seen in his ability to weave together the tale of naive Mr. Mee, the octogenarian centre of the story, with the dying professor and the story of Rouseau’s Minard and Ferrand, and in the process, imagine 20th Century theoretical physics in 18th Century terms, remind us of what the internet was like a decade ago, muse on human foibles and the nature of autobiographical literature. Perhaps an even more central thesis to the story is that consciousness comes from writing, or at least, from the type of contextualization of memory that can come from writing. If we are not telling the story, than it didn’t really have to happen. Ultimately it ties into the nature of memory in our lives and the nature of identity as a narrated self.
What begins loose falls into patterns
Because people are essentially lazy
So they develop patterns/rituals to do the most with the least amount of energy
They develop the easy efficient ways, which become their rituals, their techniques, their patterns
What was once chaotic and haphazard has been systematized and has become a formality
Formalities continue until they are rigid, and exist on strength of memory as tradition
Which is to say, the movement of an inertia
Like the train, once it has gathered speed, will not stop quickly.
It is pushed along by the weight behind it, until it is overcome by the subtle forces of friction,.
The weight of memory pushes along a tradition, yet once the efficiency that was offered is lost,
The pattern in useless and breaks; the ritual is over, the tradition dies, the inertia has been worn out by the new force of inefficiency, its friction.
A new looseness comes about and the cycle begins again.
This is in our languages, in the ways we share our thoughts,
In speech, writing and dress, in music and art and design.
The formalities of the 18th Century to that of the 19th and to that of the 20th.
The formalities break and common-ness takes over for a while, until the common becomes the new formality. Latin’s dominance gave way to the Vulgar. The pamphleteers of the 18th Century didn’t write in the scholastic language. The bloggers of the 21st Century are not writing in the formal way of academia and corporate press-releases.
But already, new blogger conventions are developing which will one day give way to a rebellion of the common, a new looseness to revive and remake that old order.
Goodreads.ca sort of began three years ago today. I say that because it really began in November 2003, and I worked on prepping the site for a January launch. Today marks the day I sent the first email to a small number of people. It grew from there. The domain name was only registered in March of 2004, and the server space to host it was also purchased at that time.
2004 – Goodreads is established. The pattern of theme, link and quote from the article in question is developed. The list structure develops into a blog on the web, as I wanted to offer an RSS feed and at the time it was the only way I could do it. This blog format goes against what I originally conceived would be a simple archive page. During the next eighteen months, I achieve the goal of growing the list by %1000.
2005 – Goodreads homepage is redesigned. The increasing presence online of video and audio shifts Goodreads from being primarily textual to taking advantage of the post-modernist understanding of all media being a form of text which is ‘read’, that is, interpreted. (Goodreads could be renamed Goodinterpretations).
2006 – Goodreads is a mixture of the ‘traditional’ link structure and the super-duper compilation. The focus begins to shift from ‘making people aware’ to documenting my interpretation and mindfulness of the web. Goodreads begins to incorporate YouTube and Google Video compilation pages.
Over the past couple of days I set up timothycomeau.com. Registered the domain name, bought the server space on Sat. 6 January 2007; most of this blog was set up on Sun. 7 January 2007. When I was asked on Friday what I planned to do on the weekend, I didn’t feel like answering ‘webdesign’ since I wasn’t sure if I would be doing this. Further, I didn’t expect to be a little hungover yesterday since I had a good time the night before, somewhat unexpectedly.
Because those things are just habits. You are not your face or your body or your thoughts. You are not your hair colour or your name or your job or your memories. We fall into the habit of thinking this is so. We fall into a pattern of me and mine which isn’t the case. What is the case is an awareness that things stick to. The awareness gets confused, or doesn’t know any better. Me and mine and our nose and our handwriting. Surely a bubble of thinking produced this text a century ago. Surely a memory was once formed of the writing, a memory now disappeared into another death. So many now, like the leaves on underground trees. Art fell apart. It became a Rolls Royce for the pretenders. The real rich bastards bought real Rolls Royce’s, not paintings, not art. Only young and naive and ignorant people went to art galleries, looking at the shit while listening to Montreal indie bands on the iPods. Art was another – or remained! – pretentious folly. So this literature is read by another one, lost to unemployment and the needs of the identity economy.
The gods of Rome stand naked in a kitchen freezer, shivering and covering their genitals with a human modesty. Haven’t we been dead long enough? they ask. No, says the dishwasher, picking up the bucket of peeled potatoes in water. No, not dead long enough. You can’t come out until we’re ready to feel bad about another holy holocaust. Prepare your guilt trips while you wait, and plan for the memory centres and the monopoly on our grief once the colonialism of Jesus is over. Until then, you stand here humiliated blue-white and starved, while we run things over the internet. Until then, fuck yourselves and have new Herculeses. Their chorus is now one of woe. But they are admonished. That opera trope is so passé.
They are fed with oranges and blue berries while they wait. But on their return, no television special. They are D-list celebrities. No one can figure out if that is Zeus or Vulcan by Jove.
The tale of them all is that there are no more tales. No more cellphones, no more art, no more laptops or iPods or clouds or geese or canoes or pretty girls for trophy wives and there are no more lives. The Universe takes a breather on the Human realm. A bit too fucked up there it concludes. But it isn’t so bad. It’s just they let the standards slip. And they paid for it.
Whose standards?
Two ends of the ego bar: on one end, the egolessness of Buddhism. Perhaps this best belongs to the left side. On the right, the glorification of the ego.
Art and anti-art: Buddhism and anti-buddhism. One glorifies and the other nullifies, and they stand in contrast to one another as technologies of dignity. I tried the art thing for my 20s. It lead to restless nights of loneliness and poverty and feelings of worthlessness in the grand scheme of things. To inflate the ego and the sense of self-importance I conceived of grand projects and felt important when people used my phone number or email address to harass me with things I didn’t care about. Spam and garbage. I tried art and the glorification of the ego and found my ego attached to a mirror image of a handsome face and a slim body, this world of my early 20s, when I was in artschool. I didn’t have to try very hard. My physical attractiveness meant I could add heartbreak to my glorification and people gave me the cute pass. Important women tried to seduce me and would confide in me. What then happened but time and food and sitting too long in front of computers and desks? Too many words read, too many written, and everything slowed downed into a soft body, pudgy with middle age, and no more cute pass. Your brains aren’t enough for this world. So what if you’re smart? That won’t buy the trophy wives to houseclean the suburb home. And so to confront this mystery of a changed world, one sits and meditates and tried to internalize the view that all this is an egg shell borrowed for a swim amidst the deluded, the hateful, and the ignorant. But no more pictures! No more art! Instead I want fine embroidery, quilted patterns, the craftsmanship of darned socks. More handmade things for this world please. And enough with the plastic crap.
But she is plastic, especially in the ways that she loves me. Concealed from each other’s paranoia, lust in the time of the Plague; we fuck and suck and all isn’t what it once was. Hair is now optional and comes only on amateur models. For professional quality one can might as well fuck a rubber doll ordered off the internet and alive not at all. Necrophillia passing off as plastophillia. It’s all the same nowadays. Please love me!This is the game. So in what world do we live? It’s time that I gave up. It all began to feel so fake; artificial contrived, pretentious. Music was one of the only things of which I was carefully ignorant to remain. If I learned too much about it I knew it would cease to be enjoyable: a balm, a calm, a lay in a dark November night.
I’ll feign illness and lay in bed for an hour, take up the pen and write suicide notes or letters threatening to kill the emperor. That way people will visit me, and if I really play my cards right, I’ll get three square meals a day, a bed of my own, and not have to sleep on grates.
This then is the legacy of a time of memory. Another world war for the newspapers. More of the same hatred and delusion and greed. This society took up the cultivation of discord and evil and I was asked to be successful within it. To validate it by my own Rolls Royce, my own Ferrari, my own trophy wife with store bought tits and an appearance on Oprah. I was asked to succeed at these things through art. Celebrity movies, incomprehension. Be fucking famous. Be another star. Because we have drowned out the out the real ones with light pollution and we are building a new constellation. Be a star for our sky, for our world, for our lie.
Am I allowed to say no thank you and go back to my newspaper pen & ink game? To reverse a thousand years of karma with a phrase so simple and mean, to say, no I’ll not be famous today, fifteen minutes is far too long already.
There is in this a simple thing really. A forgiveness to the elderly for not dying sooner: for fucking everything up with TV and laziness.
But asserted with a simple pin. In short I was afraid. My how my hair is growing thin. But this is a message to the old and the dead. There is no new crop of scholar arising to understand. Tell me if anything was ever done. Read. Pick up and read. Recite, in the name of the Creator. Recite that in the beginning was the world and it was without form and that it described that all life is suffering and that there’s an end to suffering and that it costs only three monthly payments of 19.99 so act now by calling 1-800. And all this is the end, my simple friend, the end of all our simple plans. I think I’ve been too successful at embarrassing people. And this now keeps me a quiet mouse still growing into a lion.
~
There is still a moon in the sky and lights in the rooms. Where there was once darkness there is now a television screen with animated images and all those stories. Entertainment as religion; the thing that our ancestors did and their’s did and the world is now too complicated for Shakespeare and talk radio, even the talk radio from France on philosophy. What stories! For my fat hands a fat pen. A Rolls Royce kind of kind. A big black car. Wealth and power. Don’t forget it. Quick! Quick! Take my picture for I am writing with a fountain pen! Aren’t I clever and beautiful and literary? Why not talk farming instead, since I know so little of it? Why not talk astronomy? The poets studied looser verse and the ladies rolled their eyes. Quel surprise.
~
Eventually someone will speak. Let’s forget about the Greek Gods freezing in the freezer. I still see them looking like Ego Schieles as painted by Picasso during his Blue Period of a hundred years ago. Or, I see them as Holocaust survivors about to be liberated projected from blue film. Starving, hysterical, naked, their ribs showing, awaiting the fall of monotheism and the neon dawn, but they are also just beings who should go back to their own realm. Leave us psychos alone. We have an ecosystem to ruin. Thwart the rebirth of a billion daevas. Because we’re afraid one of these screaming brats will be the next great king, queen, or talk show host. Whan! For six months, whan! And the nipples and the bottles and the diapers until one day there’s an enlightenment or a contract in Hollywood, signed with a ball-point pen and for ladies, dear ladies, a trip to the the tit man and a whitening of the smile.
And all this while prostrations
Before the personal trainer,
the new priest of a new ritual.
Self-worship demands we become our own gods
before an audience of mirrors.
But here I am with a chocolate bar. I need to wipe my mouth. I am unloved still and poverty and paunch contribute to the glamour of my humiliation. I was asked once to be a star and I said no thanks because my hair is growing thin and I did not want to be a butterfly preserved at the end of a pin. I wanted instead simple lives and simple pleasures. To wash dishes in front of a window which looked out to a landscape – grass, trees, the stereotype. But no! To Canada we go! For we live in cities and towns and it’s all graffiti and spit. Fuck it. Let us go then, you and I, a beauty stirring my stick. I’ve given up on sex and seek it only as an intimacy. I’ve had too many orgasms already to feel any biological need for another one. Special words for special feeling. An art really. But forcing it out of you … words to your silent attitude. Words and your sentences left hanging like so many limp and flaccid plants left unwatered by the fellow hired to feed the cats. Oh fuck it, it’s not like you understand anyway. There is music in the mind as there is method in the madness. I’ll grow a big mustache and say I’m ahead of my time. Dinner was over at quarter to nine.
As I mentioned in the Goodreads sent out on October 16th, I’ve prepared a transcript of the Ideas episode Economics and Social Justice, which was released today as a podcast.
Despite Mr Sacco’s acceptably flawed English, I found this to be a remarkably good listen, and I especially liked his take on what the Toronto School would call the Economics of Positional Goods. By this I mean that Mark Kingwell has been known in the past year to talk of positional goods which is borrowing from the work of his fellow University of Toronto philosophy colleague Joseph Heath, who presented on his book, The Rebel Sell two years ago with his co-author Andrew Potter, a transcript of which I made available on Goodreads some time ago and herein again for obvious thematic reasons.
In addition, because Sacco mentions in his presentation that there is a strong incentive in our culture toward stupidity, since it makes you a more pliable consumer, I was reminded of Alvin Toffler’s talk which was broadcast on TVO’s Big Ideas on September 30th. His talk was for his new book, Revolutionary Wealth where he argued that we have formed a new civilization, one I would argue which is unhealthily obsessed with the pursuit of a string of digits; Sacco would argue that we have tied our identity to these digits, administered by banks and governments, and see them as measures of our potency. Toffler argues that our society’s structures have fallen out of sync, where business is moving at an extreme rate, adapting readily to and creating change in our world but education is the dinosaur, not having kept up the pace and still teaching a curriculum designed to produce efficient factory and corporate workers.
Sacco thinks we need to invest in ourselves – that is educate ourselves – in order to remove ourselves from the rat race of competitive consumption which is tied to what he calls the economics of identity. What’s a little shocking is how this new and cool theory of economics – the economics of identity – is really rather old school. In an essay found in his Collected Works (which I tried to get on Goodreads last year but they wouldn’t let me), Northrop Frye wrote:
Still, the problem of leisure and boredom is an educational problem. Education may not solve it, but nothing else will. Schools, churches, clubs, and whatever else has any right at all to be called educational, need to think of educating for leisure as one of our central and major social needs. And education is a much broader business than studying certain subjects, though it includes that. Television, newspapers, films, are all educational agencies, though what they do mostly is more like dope peddling than like serious education. Education reflects the kind of society we have. If society is competitive and aggressive and ego-centered, education will be too; and if education is that way, it’ll produce a cynical and selfish society, round and round in a vicious circle. Intelligent and dedicated people can break this circle in a lot of places if they try hard.
What makes boredom boring? It’s not just a matter of not being busy enough. Take a girl who’s dropped out of college because the slick magazines told her she wasn’t being feminine unless she threw her brains away. What with running a house and three children and outside activities, she hasn’t a minute of free time, but she’s bored all the same. Being bored is really the feeling that there’s something missing inside oneself. When someone gets that feeling, his instinct is to feel that something outside him can supply what’s missing. This is what inspires the chase for what are called status symbols. A man struggles to get an expensive car or a mink coat for his wife in the hope that people will judge him by these things instead of by himself. One trouble with these things is that they wear out so fast. In fact, our economy partly depends on their wearing out fast. As soon as anything is recognized to be a status symbol, it begins to look silly, and we have to start chasing something else. Suppose a man wants to collect pictures, not because he likes pictures, but because it’s an approved thing to do. He’s soon fold that certain kinds of pictures are fashionable and others aren’t. But as soon as he’s got his house filled with canvases a hundred feet square covered with red paint, the fashion changes to pop art, and there he is with last year’s model of status symbols. It’s the same with all the distracting activities. A man is bored because he bores himself.
That was circa 1963. When Sacco speaks of ‘compensatory consumption’ he’s really talking about people trying to buy their way out of boredom.
But, you know, we do buy our way out of boredom all the time: we buy computers to do websites and Goodreads with, and we buy books to read which stimulate and educate. An Educated Imagination is what Pier Luigi Sacco is really calling for, and to that end here is some content by which to further that pursuit. – Timothy
‘When the individual has reached a hundred years of age, he is able to do without love and friendship. Illness and inadvertent death are not things to be feared. He practices one of the arts, or philosophy or mathematics, or plays a game of one-handed chess. When he wishes, he kills himself. When a man is the master of his own life, he is also the master of his death.’
‘Is that a quotation?’ I asked.
‘Of course. There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations’.
-Jorge Luis Borges, A Weary Man’s Utopia (1975)
Somehow the world has become a mediocre comic book, as predictable as a Star Trek episode. I grew up watching Star Trek and still love it for its graphic design, but it was never embarrassed about cannibalizing from its past storylines, and eventually it got so bad that ten minutes into an episode you could anticipate the entire plot-line. But this is an effect not confined to a show like Star Trek, it is true of almost anything on television. I was surprised when I read Chapter 18 of John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards earlier this year in the way he blended his view of art history and it’s failure to adequately resolve itself to television, which he saw as the logical conclusion of centuries of attempts at realistic image making. Image making, he thought, is tied to our desires for rituals. And TV combines animated images with ritual plot-lines, as predictable to contemporary viewers as those reciting along with a priest as he holds up the host. As he wrote:
People are drawn to television as they are to religions by the knowledge that they will find there what they already know. Reassurance is consistency and consistency is repetition. Television – both drama and public affairs – consists largely of stylized popular mythology in which there are certain obligatory characters who must say and do certain things in a particular order. After watching the first minute of any television drama, most viewers could lay out the scenario that will follow, including the conclusion. Given the first line of banter in most scenes, a regular viewer could probably rhyme off the next three or four lines. Nothing can be more formal, stylized and dogmatic than a third-rate situation comedy or a television news report on famine in Africa. There is more flexibility in a Catholic mass or in classic Chinese opera.
He went on to say, and I think this is a kicker given how it was probably written in the 1980s:
The rise of CNN (Cable News Network) canonizes the television view of reality as concrete, action-packed visuals. Wars make good television, providing the action is accessible and prolonged. The Middle East, for example, is an ideal setting for television war. Cameras can be permanently on the spot, and a fixed scenario of weekly car bombs, riots and shelling ensures that the television structure will have ongoing material.
(It makes Steven Colbert’s joke about this past summer’s Israel-Lebanese war more than just a joke but a perfectly conscious reflection of the reality of the situation). In addition, the violence on television reflects a long Western tradition in depicting violence, seen in graphic mediaeval crucifixions and the tortured damned we are familiar with from those seemingly unenlightened times.
But from the enlightened times we got Goya’s image, the sleep of reason producing monsters. As Mark Kingwell points out in his essay ‘Critical Theory and Its Discontents’ the image’s caption can be read two ways, as either ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’ or ‘the dream of reason produces monsters’.1 John Ralston Saul, with Voltaire’s Bastards took the later interpretation for his thesis. But the experience of this decade is one of the first reading: the thoughtlessness of the times producing predictable nightmares.
~
Everything has gotten so insane that peace and quiet and non-interaction certainly has a lot more appeal. No need to answer the same old questions about how I am, which are rhetorical and meaningless, no need to tell the same boring stories about myself or the state of my life, no need to feel the peer pressure of conforming to someone else’s idea of who I am, who I should be, or how I should be. It is better in this decade to withdraw and watch operas on DVD (Wagner’s The Ring), or famous TV shows (Battlestar Gallactica is like such a masterpiece); and to avoid browsing websites too much because it just seems to add to the sense that everything has gone to bullshit, as MacLeans seems to think as well. So I missed the whole beauty video thing until the day before I saw it on the front page of the Toronto Star, and as I’ve been adjusting over the past month to a 6.30am wake up time to become a ‘corporate minion of patriarchy’ (my Halloween costume) I’m not so eager to go a’gathering for goodreads. I’ve been warning you all for months now that this project isn’t what it used to be, and that will continue to be true in the future. This list began small enough that I knew my audience – drank and laughed with some of you in the past – but now has become anonymous and my motivations for doing it continue to be some sick sense of responsibility to do my part to inform whoever might come a’googlin. I should be much more selfish and egotistical to fit in properly I know. But my work on the web in the past has come from a desire to document, and at this time I would like to use this list to promote and to document for whatever that’s worth.
Death of a President was released in North America on Friday, and it probably won’t be in theatres for long. Not that it matters, because it will attain a deserved cult-status on DVD or streamed from wherever. First of all, having never seen George W. Bush in person he has always been nothing but an animated image to me. Real through portrayal and the delusion of the animated image, and so fitting, I think, to see that image manipulated into another version of a potential reality borrowed from many months from now. The skill of the digital effects became apparent very quickly; ten minutes into it I recognized it as a masterpiece, a shockingly effective use of Photoshop-like tech, and a devastating commentary on current global-american-centric-politics. I mean, what other President of the United States has inspired a fictional yet realistic depiction of his assassination while still in office to the extant that the film is presented as an historical documentary on the subject?This blending of time – watching images from a future, depicting an event from a year from now, presented as some bleeding-heart leftist documentary typically shown on CBC Newsworld on Sunday nights, twists itself into the cold water blast of just how stupid everything has gotten (given how the movie is built out of the current media clichés, from the dialogue right up the structure) but also how we’re caught up in a television dream dictating reality to us. The film hits all the right points, with an eerie accuracy, from the deluded missus posing as Bush’s speechwriter saying how he was somehow connected to God, to the political backdrop of North Korea and Iran. The speeches have been written and the players have taken to the stage and Shakespeare’s famous line has never seemed more true.
And for that reason, for the sheer fictionalization of our reality, this moment in later history which seems real because it is on TV, real through portrayal, this film will also be must-see viewing for Presidential historians, both present and future. I am compelled to write about it now, to time-stamp this text with the current date, so that there is evidence to future researchers that this movie came out a year before the October 2007 events that it depicts. I would like to think that this movie will still be watched in future years, long after the Bush administration; as a sociological study of this decade, a study in documentary narrative, as an art film, and as an historical marker of the transformative power of Photoshop-like effects. I got a glismpe watching this movie of the media-scape of the upcoming century and felt future-shock. Nuanced political discourse through fictional history, which only highlights our current confusion between memory and thought. This film is cultural evidence that we can only seem to think through the ‘hindsight is always 20/20’ trope, and that retrospective documentaries have become so prevalent in the age of the self-absorbed baby-boomer-at-the-controls-of-everything (and hence a narcissistic mediascape on their politics, youth, and classic album collections) that it’s only fitting to examine a presidency’s attack on civil liberties through the genre.
The CBS Sunday Morning program had a piece on Oct 29 on the beauty video and Photoshop – explaining what young creative people take for granted to the old foggies who watch that sentimental sunday morning sunshine stuff. And the key is what young people are taking for granted versus what the old foggies running the show have in their minds about our future. An older person close to me the other day posited that I might live long enough to see one of Toronto’s main traffic arteries – the Don Valley Parkway – turned into a double-decker highway. As if allowing for more greenhouse gas emitting machines would be an adequate solution to our traffic problems, a vision completely oblivious to environmental concerns. I countered I’d much rather see a better public transit infrastructure built. But of course, I understand where this idea comes from. It’s classic ‘cars are a great and my identity as a man is tied to the sense of freedom they bring me and the teenage sense of fuck you I never got over’. It’s the same mid-twentieth century mentality that you get from politicians when they promote the need for more people to study math and science, because not only is there a space race and we have to prove that consumerist democracy rocks, but because we need all those future engineers to retro-fit these highways into double-decker monstrosities. Ah these old people: it’s enough to wish them all dead, or at least look forward to the future when they’ve left the scene and we can build the world into something more fair and beautiful. They all gave up after Bobby was assassinated, and you can watch all about it on November 23rd. What a contrast. We’re in a situation when eloquent and visionary politicians are now part of a dreamy past, while our present is made up of inarticulate war-mongering folks notable for their lack of vision. That doesn’t seem to me a sign of a healthy state of affairs.
Wishing a certain old-foggie dead is precisely what director Gabriel Range has tapped into. I saw it at a 3:50 matinee with four other people. That is to say, I went alone and there were only three other people in the audience. I’m not sure if that’s worthy of mention – seeing late afternoon matinees on Sunday afternoons isn’t popular enough to be stereotypical. But it also contributed to the feeling that I was watching a secret masterpiece living up to art’s typical response from consumerist culture. They were told to not watch it by the media who readily quoted the likes of Hillary Clinton who thought it was ‘despicable‘. It fits into the thoughts I’ve had lately about Hitler’s famous degenerate art show: Hitler, as John Carey pointed out in his 2005 book What Good are the Arts? was being populist with that exhibit, selling the public their own prejudices toward modern art. But there is a theory about how art is a psychological reflection of the zeitgeist, capturing the spirit of the age, and it seems to be ironic that Hitler, in promoting this to mock it, provided an historical marker for modernist art and highlighted the degeneracy of the society which legitimately elected him in 1933. It was degenerate art made within a degenerate society and Hitler unwittingly held up a mirror thinking it a spotlight. Whenever politicians start making pronouncements on cultural products, one has to think something significant is going on which will need explaining to future generations: that it is an art historical moment.
We’re supposed to all know the game. It’s what makes a film like Death of President possible: string together all the tv documentary clichés for an audience made sophisticated enough by an ambient televised environment to not be confused by the fiction. But of course I say that as someone who saw it with four other people, a film which as far as box-office measures go, did not exist, and as someone with the capacity to reflect on what I saw. As I walked out of the theatre I heard the terrified screams coming from the next theatre-room, looking back I saw the poster for Saw III. Of course Geogre Bush is President in a time when watching violence is what enough people want to do to make it the top film this weekend. You might point out a horror movie is appropriate for Halloween, but Halloween is only appropriate for children. The popularity of violence in whatever manner just highlights our collective immaturity and our inability to grow beyond a mediaeval past, as Bush’s recent moves toward the elimination of habeas corpus show.
JRS wrote: ‘This perpetual motion machine works effortlessly if the flood of images illustrates situations the viewer already understands. That is one of the explanations for the system’s concentration on two or three wars when there are forty or so going on around the world. The others are eliminated because they are less accessible on a long-term basis. Or because the action is less predictable and regular. Or because the issue involved does not fit easily into the West’s over-explained, childlike scenarios of Left versus Right or black versus white. Or because the need for endless images makes television structures unwilling to undertake the endless verbal explanations and nonvisual updates which would be required for the other thirty-seven wars to be regularly presented.’ This was first published in 1992. In the time between now and then, nothing has changed. While the audience have grown more sophisticated, so has television’s methods at keeping the conversation simple. But for me, there is another question, and that is, why? Why is any of this important? Ritual? That alone seems too simple an explanation. I watch TV for the illusion of company and for the occasional good, or big idea.
What is television for? Some will say it’s merely to get us to buy things, but others will say it is to inform. But are we being informed or frustrated? Isn’t anything political on television simply a way of frustrating a democratic citizenship into feelings of impotence when faced with such inane political figures? And isn’t it this sense of frustration precisely what leads to the events depicted in Death of a President? That’s not something you’d get with an uninformed populace, nor perhaps one you’d get if the political machinery actually could register the democratic will of the population. We remain dictated to, told what to think about movies by Hillary Clinton or whatever expert they got hold of at the local university.
I first read Borges’ story, A Weary Man’s Utopia in the winter of 2001 following you know what, when the shit had hit the fan and all the flags were flying. It is the story of a man’s afternoon visit with a fellow in a far distant future. He tells the the fellow
‘In that strange yesterday from which I have come,’ I replied, ‘there prevailed the superstition that between one evening and the next morning, events occur that it would be shameful to have no knowledge of. The planet was peopled by spectral collectives – Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, the Common Market. Almost no one knew the prior history of those Platonic entities, yet everyone was informed of the most trivial details of the latest conference of pedagogues or the imminent breaking off relations between one of these entities and another and the messages that their presidents sent back and forth – composed by a secretary to the secretary, and in the prudent vagueness that the form requires. All this was no sooner read than forgotten, for within a few hours it would be blotted out by new trivialities. Of all functions, that of the politician was without doubt the most public. An ambassador or a minister was a sort of cripple who had to be transported in long, noisy vehicles surrounded by motorcyclists and grenadiers and stalked by eager photographers. One would have thought their feet had been cut off, my mother used to say. Images and the printed word were more real than things. People believed only want they could read on the printed page. The principle, means and end of our singular conception of the world was esse est percipi – “to be is to be portrayed”. In the past I lived in, people were credulous.
I would like to think that in the years since it was published in 1975, people have become less credulous. But the forms of these popular delusions have only aggregated more nuance, so that things are not only read, but heard and seen, and people believe what they read on screens. Or at least the old foggies who are freaked out by Wikipedia seem to think so, severely underestimating the capacities of people to understand the collective nature of the site.
As for politicians being cripples: I recently saw a motorcade come up University Avenue in Toronto and turn onto Queen St – first the chorus of motorbike cops, lead by someone who parked in the center of the intersection, leaping off to perform his ritual in the same manner a parodist would: exaggerated self importance as he held the traffic back, like a romantic hero confronting a tide, and along came the parade of black cars with their two-wheeler escorts. Who was this asshole? I thought. Some celebrity? I still don’t know, although I later heard the Prime Minister was in town. Perhaps it was him. But it seems to me that to parade around in black cars with tinted windows reveals a foolish paranoia: they all think they’re important enough to be assassinated and so hide from us as if we’re all crazy, showing a contempt for the citizenry which is unfair. Leaders shouldn’t hide from us and treat us as if we’re dangerous. But ironically that’s precisely the type of behaviour that leads to the protests they need to be protected from. – Timothy
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1. The essay is found in the book Practical Judgments pages 171-181 and the quote is itself a quote from one of the books he’s reviewing; the orginal thought is attributed to the introduction by David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy in their 1994 book, Critical Theory.
My fellow Canadian CBC listeners, who plug your headphones into the computer at work and stream it as I do, who listen to it in the morning as you type your theses because you’re a television snob; who have come to appreciate the music for the news they introduced earlier this year as something iconic, and who may have fond memories of Peter Gzowski and the opening music to Morningside, you listeners know that Lister Sinclair died today, at age 85, in a Toronto hospital. The news made me think that’s how I’d like to go – in my 80s, with the radio playing Glenn Gould and Mozart in my honour. A good life, well spent, with everyone talking about how learned and kind you were. (Except for dying in a Toronto hospital – since I saw Dying at Grace I’ve felt it would be better to die in a ditch under the stars).
My first encounter with the voice of Lister Sinclair came in the summer of 1991. I was listening to EMF’s one-hit-wonder album that season, the single ‘Unbelievable’ on the endless repeat possible with dub cassette tapes and rewind. I’d work away at my Commodore 64 and listen to Side A and then Side B, and through this learned how to spell the word ‘believe’ since it was a song title. And on one of these songs there was a sample of a BBC Shakespeare radio play with a gravitas accented announcer. I was naive enough at the time to wonder, when I was rolling my radio tuner sometime after 9pm that night, if this voice speaking about nightingales was the voice from the album. Later I’d untangled the confusion but I was hooked to the strangeness of that broadcast, one of the series of things that begin with a certain letter, or something themed around a colour. Anyway, I tuned in at 9 the following night to catch more.
This, my friends, was an example of the CBC being hip, a far cry from George Stroumboulopoulos’ latest hints that he pierced his cock, which is how the CBC is trying to sell it today. Lister Sinclair’s sober weirdness made a much stronger impression on my sense of teenage cool than the middle class punk aesthetic which now passes for hipster ways.
Ideas is running a three part tribute over the next three nights, where it is 9pm local throughout Canada.
In the last Goodreads, sent on Friday, I promoted that evening’s Ideas, and now the voice who once presented its ideas has gone. This Goodreads serves the double purpose of sharing my thoughts on the matter (I hope you don’t mind) and to inform you that the episode on ‘Economics and Social Justice’ which I promoted will be an Ideas podcast on November 20th. In the meantime, I’m working on a transcription from the recording I made, which I’ll post on the site on that date. – Timothy
I may not have written in a long time but today was o.k. PS I’m a Space Ace1.
________________ 1. Space Ace referred to a video game in which I had achieved a high score.
And thus, that is the end of the 1986 Diary entries. I didn’t try to keep a diary again until three years later at age 14, but I ended up destroying that one because I didn’t want to remember that year. Things were better the following year, and it was then that I began to keep notebooks and develop a Journal.
The Facts & Arguments section of last Thursday’s (Sept 7th) Globe & Mail brought this article by Geoffrey Lean to my attention, where it is noted that ‘food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging the world into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures show that this year’s harvest will fail to produce enough to feed everyone on Earth, for the sixth time in the past seven years. Humanity has so far managed by eating its way through stockpiles built up in better times – but these have now fallen below the danger level’.
Earlier in the week I picked up Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap at a used bookstore. This particular copy seems to have been someone else’s review-copy, since I found tucked inside the cover the photocopied blurb for his upcoming title The Upside of Down; Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (to be published October 31st). The blurb offers as a teaser the Prologue, which sets the stage with a reminder of Ancient Rome, which grew too complex and fell because its citizens couldn’t maintain its late stages. Homer-Dixon writes, ‘In this book we’ll discover that our circumstances today are like Rome’s in key ways. Our societies are becoming steadily more complex and often more rigid…Eventually, as occurred in Rome, the stresses will become too extreme, and our societies too inflexible to respond, and some kind of economic or political breakdown is likely to occur. I’m not alone in this view. These days, lots of people have the intuition that the world is going haywire and an extraordinary crisis is coming’.
We are indeed lucky to be thus living in such a time, before the extraordinary crisis. Because it seems to me that when we find ourselves there – maybe in another ten years or so? – won’t we look back with nostalgia to the simpler time of this decade, and pine for the days when old Papa Bush was on TV everynight, making us laugh with his goofy phrasings, and miss the simple-minded certainty offered by the idea that Muslim fanatics want to kill us?
Which is to say that only in a society which has enough food, whose cities aren’t being destroyed by storms, whose children are well-sheltered and well-fed, can we afford the time and resources to let our politicians play boys-with-toys war games. We truly must be living in a utopia, to have the luxury to use our time and money so productively in being afraid of one another.
Because we don’t have an extraordinary crisis to unite us and to force us to work together. Our cities are not being destroyed by storms. There isn’t a plague ravaging continents. We aren’t living with a lead-pipe infrastructure based on an finite resource that we are squandering. There is no asteroid headed our way to force Bruce Willis and Steve Buscemi to become astronauts, nor are there aliens coming to blow up the White House and force President Bush to brush up on his fighter-pilot skills, last used protecting Texan airspace during the Vietnam War (if we don’t count the air-craft carrier thing from a few years back). At the end of the day we can sit back and watch the war-show and the comedic commentaries and look forward to going back to our soul-nurturing jobs in the morning and think, today was a good day. Because the extraordinary crisis is coming, but not already here. We have the luxury of war and terrorism in this decade, and we’d better enjoy it while it lasts.
Meanwhile, commentators like Homer-Dixon, Ronald Wright, and Jared Diamond warn us that things are shaky. This civilization may not survive the 21st Century. Homer-Dixon, in his prologue, writes, ‘Rome’s story reveals that civilizations, including our own, can change catastrophically. It also suggest the dark possibility that the human project is so evanescent that it’s essentially meaningless. Most sensible adults avoid such thoughts. Instead, we invest enormous energy in our families, friends, jobs, and day-to-day activities. And we yearn to leave some enduring evidence of our brief moment on Earth, some lasting sign of our individual or collective being. So we construct a building, perhaps, or found a company, write a book, or raise a family. We seldom acknowledge this deep desire for meaning and longevity, but it’s surely one source of our endless fascination with Rome’s fall: if we could just understand Rome’s fatal weakness, maybe our societies could avoid a similar fate and preserve their accomplishments for eternity.”
Let us then consider this American-centric civilization’s accomplishments: paranoid parents who think their fat video-game playing moronic children will be raped by pudgy balding men. Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise. The American news-media. Cellophane packaged food. Chemicals with unpronounceable names. Industrialized slaughter houses for our domesticated animals, one of which (the cow) now has to be treated as potential toxic waste. Oprah Winfrey’s book club, to industrialize fiction consumption. A tourism industry. An art industry. Designers working away designing the knobs for the ends of curtain rods. Marketing agencies. Billboards. Short films conceptually contrived to promote things.
I’m just playing the USA=Western Civilization game, since, that’s the PR, the marketing, the televised ads, and the billboards have told me my whole life. England would seem to be the Mini-me side-kick, while Canada is USA’s nerdy brother, perhaps austistic, perhaps a good reader. Canada has an inferiority complex and isn’t as glamourous as the more famous brother. Canada is Napoleon Dynamite’s brother chatting up hot babes on the internet. Canada is Western Civilization’s art movie compared to the USA’s Schawrzenegger action flick.
It seems like France, Russia, Poland, Italy – they’re civilizations unto themselves and are thus somewhat divorced from the Anglo-American Empire’s sphere of influence. I’m not sure where Australia fits in since they’re more Anglo than American. Nevertheless, the United States has over 700 military bases in 130 countries in the world. Whatever we think we’re doing when we call ourselves democracies, and whatever we think of our political situation, that reality alone makes the USA Rome. And while Rome left a legacy which can still inspire sixteen hundred years after the fact, a legacy of art, architecture and law, the American Empire’s legacy so far seems to be highways and chemically processed stuff, its art made largely without archival concerns, its documents increasingly becoming subject to digital fragility.
Rome’s reputation for wickedness – brilliantly captured in I Claudius – is usually taught to us via Christian exegesis with gladiatorial reference but I think USA is well on her way to matching Rome’s record given that in July, the Internet Watch Foundation (a UK ‘child porn hotline’ site, which prefers to refer to such images as simply ‘child abuse’) reported that servers in the United States host 50% of the world’s ‘child abuse content’ while the wild-west of Russia (where your last phishing attempt may have come from) is only responsible for 15%. If we take as a measure how we treat our children as a sign of civilization, one has a rather perverse way of judging the winner of the Cold War. This rather abysmal accomplishment of American/Western Civilization – the sexualization of children (I can’t even watch anything on Jon Benet Ramsay, nevermind August’s weirdo) is something I can’t even be sarcastic about here and want to triumph as another grand accomplishment of our globalized society worth preserving.
Homer-Dixon’s thoughts can be answered: yes our society is haywire, and yes, this can only lead to a greater crisis down the road. But if we agree that current living conditions are inhumane and not worth preserving, what then is the better way? It is a moral question – that is, it calls us to envision and articulate a vision of a good life which is currently being articulated for us by Hollywood and advertising. We are not choosing to live lives with meaning or with purpose. We are choosing to fit ourselves into someone else’s image of the world, striving to buy stuff we don’t need and tempted to envy by by Robin Leach’s fucking voiceovers. This decade’s terrorist nonsense is nothing more than another example of the resources squandered by the rich and famous. Because, once again, it’s not like we don’t have enough food. So, if kids screaming at their computers while others lip-sync ‘Numa Numa’; racism and intolerance; cold-heartedness; celebrity waste and stupidity isn’t this civilization’s vision of utopia, then what is?
Is our real crime, not that we have achieved these things, but that we jumped ahead and achieved them without a sustainable framework? Would we all want SUV’s if they contributed to the health of the planet? Would we all want to be obese if there were a pill that could make us Hollywood lean overnight? (Thereby making us procrastinate about taking it, saying, ‘oh, I just don’t feel like being thin today’ while we order the super-size fries). Isn’t the real horror about some of this (excluding the child-sex abomination) based on the fact that we’re indebting our children to a life more poor than our own? Because, evidently, our economy of supplying need-and-greed has made us happy to have cluttered homes and it’s obvious that this hoarding is in part due to a fuck-the-future selfishness.
Here, I’m reminded of the German historian Götz Aly, who wrote of Hitler: ‘Hitler gained overwhelming support with his policy of running up debts and explaining that it would be others that paid the price. He promised the Germans everything and asked little of them in return. The constant talk of “a people without living space”, “international standing”, “complementary economic areas” and “Jew purging” served a single purpose: to increase German prosperity without making Germans work for it themselves. This was the driving force behind his criminal politics: not the interests of industrialists and bankers such as Flick, Krupp and Abs. Economically, the Nazi state was a snowballing system of fraud. Politically, it was a monstrous bubble of speculation, inflated by the common party members”.
This is to say that our superficial wealth today, founded on the infrastructure of non-renewable oil, means poverty for our children’s children. Governments have given up passing laws – making intentional decisions – in favor of passing tax-cuts or tax-breaks, reserving attempts at law-making for such retrogressive ends as rebutting gay marriage or trying to legitimize torture. (Which implies that they can’t imagine how to control people in those ways through tax-breaks).
People have come to equate wealth with volumes of money and not with the cultural riches which make a place worth visiting and living in and treating as an heirloom. So we’ve built ugly office towers all over the world because they’re utilitarian function is to warehouse human capital for 8 or more hours a day and left to execute their inane tasks so that the minority in control of the organization can benefit from their expertise, skill and time, to play golf all day. This means that the cultural riches of our civilization, that which we hope to leave for our children to enjoy are not the maginficant cathedrals of yesteryear, but the landscaped greens of the 18-hole golf course to be found wherever there’s room to put one (even in the deserts of Saudi Arabia). But it’s not like we don’t have enough fresh water or anything.
If the sustainability issue were to be fixed in the next 25 years so that in 2031 we could indulge in guilt free celebrity watching at the Toronto Film Fest, would we still be miserable when superficially nothing had changed? Would we then be happy with a civilization of kiddie-porn perverts, fat and stupid kids, congested highways, fear-mongering news-media, thoughtless politicians?
If this consumerist utopia would not be acceptable then, why is it acceptable now? Again, what kind of world would we like to live in? What kind of life would we like to live? Because, with reference to Homer Dixon’s ‘extraordinary crisis’ those will be the questions that will need answering. And if we can’t answer it now, when we have all time time in the world, how much more difficult will it be to answer when our cities have begun to be destroyed by storms?
Adam Curtis
It may help if we were familiar with how we got here. An excellent summary can be found in the films of Adam Curtis.
I first came across the documentaries of Adam Curtis when The Power of Nightmares was broadcast on CBC Newsworld in the spring of 2005. I soon found copies online and linked to them on Goodreads (issue 05w17:1). In the 18 months since, we’ve had Google Video show up where you can now find the Nightmares series in better quality than what was then available and where you can also find his 2002 documentary The Century of the Self.
The Century of the Self is as remarkable as Nightmares in that it traces the influence of Sigmund Freud over the course of 20th Century Western soceity through, not only his theories, but his family. I was very surprised to learn that Freud’s nephew Edmund Bernays was the fellow who invented ‘public relations’ as an alternative form of propaganda, and who is thus responsible for the past century’s advertising industry. Basically, the story told in Century of the Self is how the marketing and advertising industry grew up around the idea that we were motivated by unconscious desires which could only be placated through products. We were turned into consumers by an application of Freud’s psychoanalysis; to such and extant that by the end of the century governments were treating us as customers and politcians saw themselves as managers in the retail sector of public services. Not only that, but the whole ‘selfish-baby-boomer’ / lifestyle politics / yuppie-thing’ of the 1980s has its roots in this combination of psychology and marketing.
(It should be noted that this documentary dates from 2002, the same year when John Ralston Saul mocked this point of view in a presentation for his then recently released book On Equilibrium recorded in Toronto and later broadcast on CBC’s Ideas. I raise this to suggest that in the years since things have changed so that this type of talk can now seem a little old-fashioned (as is Saul’s thesis in his most recent book, The Collaspe of Globalism). Instead of being treated as customers with regard to public services, we now have to deal with two-bit explanations of the world’s pseudo-problems caused by conservative men trying to fit everything into their god-box).
Curtis’s narratives, while profound, are also weak in the sense that they are too simplistic: the reality of our Western society since 1950 is a complex weave and while we can analyze a thread here and there, a larger pattern is meanwhile being expressed. The plot of the 20th century as presented in Century of the Self was that people were understood to be irrational and so it was thought democracy could never work; they were thus lulled into docility by bought dreams of happiness; dreams woven by Public Relations people.
Of course, business was complicit in this conspiracy, because they’d always feared a time when industrial supply would overwhelm demand and thus lead to a failure to sell. Lifestyle marketing eliminated that worry and in the process created Individualism. (John Ralston Saul’s brilliant analysis of Individualism is to be found as Chapter 19 of Voltaire’s Bastards). Politicians, in turn, used focus-group techniques to get themselves elected and then cater to the self-interested civilians/subjects-of-lifestyle-marketing (Individuals) with the added benefit that a docile population is democratically ineffective allowing those in charge to do whatever they want.
The population of the United States in 1790 was a little less than 4 million. That of the UK at the time was a little over 16 million. And so a Continental Congress from a population of less than the Greater Toronto Area declared independence from the Parliament representing half of the current Canadian population. These numbers, in today’s context, make history seem like the story of people who had nothing else better to do. And it shows just how docile our world is given our enormous numbers. We live within a remarkable feet of social-structuring brought about by educational conditioning.
This describes what John Ralston Saul constantly refers to as a corporatist society, which is fragmented into interest-groups; where the population is obedient and docile and feels incompetent beyond their area of expertise. Democracy has become a sham because we’ve given up control over our lives so that it can be scheduled by our bosses. But if we believe life is about ‘expressing our selves’ then we can buy a fast-food version: our identities come through products which saves time thinking about anything and we can thus focus on getting our jobs done in our machine-world. We live in a time were we routinely refer to people as ‘human capital’ and expect them to behave as smoothly in a role as any other machined, interchangeable part. This basic everyday dehumanization has stripped us of a sense of dignity which leads to weak backs and slumped shoulders and thus a new market for Dr. Ho’s pillows.
Curtis’s Wikipedia page states that he is working on a new series to air later this year, called Cold Cold Heart about the ‘the death of altruism and the collapse of trust – trust in politicians, trust in institutions and trust in ourselves, both in our minds and our bodies.’ I am looking forward to seeing this, since it is this quality of distrust, mean-spirtedness, and lack of trust in our selves by which I’ll forever remember this decade with the same amount of disgust I’ve so far had only for the 1980s. This series would seem to be an extension of Part 4 of Self because it was in this episode that Curtis traced the development of consumerist politics, and showed an excerpt for Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic convention speech, followed by an interview conducted for the series where Cuomo says, (at about the 20 minute mark) ‘The worst thing Ronald Reagan did was to make the denial of compassion respectable’.
It is this quality of distrust and hard-heartedness that I’d like to better understand because our current society is nothing more than the expression of our own dehumanized inhumanity. But I’m not so caught up in Western-centrism to think there’s no alternative. The history of many civilizations teaches us that things have gotten really bad many times; each time the horrors pass and something simpler comes in its place. This is the thesis of Homer Dixon’s upcoming book. His point will be that we can control our future. We shouldn’t get caught up in dooming-and-glooming the present which doesn’t deserve to survive. I think we should instead begin brainstorming about what kind of society we’d like to live in, and then try to make it happen somehow.
The current Canadian population is about 32 million. In January, Apple Computers announced it had sold 42 million iPods around the world. This means that Apple’s infrastructure – to handle the registration requirements – is greater than that needed by the 1st world nation of Canada. It would seem to follow that if 32 million people can give themselves health-care, so could the 43 million uninsured Americans. Of course, this isn’t likely to happen, precisely due to the fractured nature of the common good brought about by the rise of Individualism.
While Individualism can be seen as having broken society, I’d like to think this is only temporary. The Individual rose up in a century dominated by dictatorships – not only political, but also cultural. The greatest art form of the 20th Century is undoubtedly the movie, which consists of a passive audience watching someone’s else’s artistic vision. At a basic level it is a dictatorial relationship. The Individual is now driving a cultural paradigm shift that makes the iPod the primary symbol of current cultural relationships – people want control over their cultural products, which is vastly different than the passive acceptance of media which existed throughout the 20th Century. The internet has empowered people away from the illusion of community and participation brought about through consumerism, and begun instead to interconnect them with other like minded people which can only in turn build bridges to new communities. Individualism now operates in such a way that someone like myself can watch these Curtis videos and feel educated and enlightened and informed, not only because MSM had originally served it to me through a scheduled broadcast, but because I downloaded it from a website, as can you. – Timothy
Today, the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan went up by four. I haven’t been keeping count so I don’t know what the total is. What I do know is that this headline pops up every second week or so and is part of the larger pattern of patriarchal conservative governments in power (who keep falling inline to the Bush Administration’s patriarchal and dim-witted view of the world). When the Liberals were in power, the Canadians were only being killed by American ‘friendly-fire’. But since the Harper government came to power we’ve seen the Canadians take on more responsibility and become the prime-movers in keeping Afghanistan from falling back to Taliban control. This decade is full of war news because conservative men are running things – be they conservative Islamic men who think the whole world should be Muslim; or conservative Western men who try to tie all this crap to ideas about the glory of war, and ‘right wars’ against ‘evil’ people.Personally, I think the Taliban are shits so I don’t mind the Canadian mission. I am not taking Jack Layton’s recent suggestion to withdraw and negotiate for peace with Taiban seriously. I am a little annoyed with the fact that the awfulness of the Taliban is being obscured in favour of Canadian navel-gazing ( a selfishness which makes headlines of soldiers deaths with no real analysis of what they’re doing in the first place). To say that we’re stooges for half-assed American imperial ambitions is too simple. To say that Canadian soldiers are occasionally being killed because we have a Conservative government in office is also simplistic but somewhat accurate. But I don’t think as a nation we’re all together too simple-minded to agree that keeping the Taliban from returning to power is a worthy thing.
In the months before September 11 2001 (five years ago in the past) the Taliban’s control over Afghanistan was beginning to make headlines in North America. This is the group that executed women on soccer fields, made it illegal to not have a beard, and blew up ancient Buddhist statues as representations of idol worship. It is not an exaggeration to call such behaviors barbaric. Meanwhile, the American government was overlooking such (dare I call them atrocities?) policies because Taliban barbarity was keeping poppies from being grown, and as a reward for their part in the glorious War on Drugs, were receiving significant funding and support. (Ok, maybe not ‘significant’ funding – I’m fuzzy on the details, but I’m working with what was being said five years ago).
All this changed that Tuesday in September. By the late afternoon of the 11th, there was a statement by the leader of the Taliban making the broadcast rounds saying they had nothing to do with the day’s events. Which of course was untrue, as they’d sheltered Bin Laden (who at first too denied responsibility). When the United States attacked the Taliban in October, the reasons were clear and understandable. Overthrowing a barbaric regime was a good thing to do. Chasing after Bin Laden was justified. Men, ‘liberated’ (how that word has been cheapened since) were able to go the barber’s and get a shave for the first time in years.
(I occasionally grow beards and last did so this summer. I shaved it off three weeks ago and this example will always make me thankful that I at least have the option, unlike the men living under the Taliban regime).
Circa 2003 the Americans had destroyed the Taliban. There were accusations of massacres, (which for war is unfortunately normal). There was the fact that they shipped off a lot of these captured men to Gitmo and that some of them were innocent and that some of them were children; all of which will hopefully get sorted out and corrected one day. The Taliban was gone and the civilians of Afghanistan could begin to rebuild civilization under the security provided by outside forces.
Three years later, the Americans have abandoned Afghanistan to the Canadians to devote themselves to securing the Iraqi oil infrastructure so that more obese Americans can scoot around in SUVs using relatively cheap gasoline. (Because ‘America is addicted to oil’ – President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2006). Osama Bin Laden, on the run in Afghanistan, was able to get away because the Bush family had unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. This has meant that the Taliban have been able to rebuild their forces and are trying to return to power, killing Canadians in the process. But, unlike Jack Layton (proving why the NDP are largely irrelevant) I don’t think we should negotiate for peace with them and bring the soldiers home so that we’ll have more on hand for the next Toronto snow storm. Let them do their jobs helping to secure a landscape that hasn’t been at peace in decades. One day they’ll be able to return, but hopefully that will be long after the Taliban have ceaased to be relevant.
If The One had been solely a CBC production, one suspects that would have charged ahead to do what they could to promote the career of George Stroumboulopoulos, but thankfully sense kicked in at ABC and it has been cancelled. When I read this welcome news in last week’s paper, I noticed that it ended on the usual, ‘CBC is searching for a vision in the age of the internet’. To find this vision, it would help if CBC had a sense of its history, and a sense of traveling around the country without satellite hookups for broadband reporting.The idea behind The One it was reported, was to raise Stroumboulopoulos’ profile so that cable-less rubes would not be shocked when The Hour debuts on the main network in the fall, following The National. Why this type of thing is required, I don’t know. I do know that The Hour is already unwatchable due to it’s too cool for school attitude. I don’t need to know anything happening in the world badly enough to have it portioned out in bullet point cool to learn about it. I do know that CBC used to have great shows that treated young people as intelligent (Big Life, CounterSpin) but undoubtedly these were repeatedly cancelled due to low ratings. Why the CBC needs to chase ratings is a good question.
1. A Public Broadcaster
The public should demand greater funding for the CBC so that it doesn’t have to chase ratings and so that it can feel free to broadcast esoteric programing of limited appeal. This itself is a very old idea, so why are we still talking about it? Why hasn’t this happened yet?
But given enough resources, to match the ideal the CBC needs to recognize that there are 24 hours in a day and this is the time of VCRs and TIVO. There should be plenty of room on the schedule for all sorts of weird stuff that broaden our perspective and who cares if some it will be on at 4am? Young people know how to set VCRs. Something as wild as the gay-fisting show might have a place on the channel. It would be offensive to some (hell, to many), but shouldn’t public broadcasting aim to smooth out our preconceived notions by helping us become well-rounded? Shouldn’t contemporary sophisticated people at least understand what such a thing as gay-fisting is, even if it’s not their cup of tea? There should be no room for ‘I don’t know’ in today’s world. CBC, help us broaden our minds, not limit them by giving us what we think we want!
2. From Coast to Coast
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was developed to provide a coast to coast radio network in the 1930s, when this was a new technology whose benefit and advantage was obvious. But what kind of broadcasting is of interest to 20 year olds? Wi-Fi. CBC used to have a station of antennae and powerful broadcast equipment in New Brunswick which put out the network’s short-range radio signal. This station was shut down during the 1990s after the internet made it obsolete. If they thought that was worthy of investment why not Wi Fi as well? Take a laptop or a Blackberry to the rural corners of the country and you’ll be lucky to find a signal. My recent experience traveling through the East Coast on summer holiday brought this to mind – I did find signals but they were weak and didn’t really work that well. But it seems to me that if the people from the 1930s were still around, they’d be arguing for a network of wi-fi towers that stretch from sea to sea. This would also have the benefit of bringing broadband internet access to the rural communities along the US border and further an international image of being considerate.
What we are seeing, in Toronto at any rate, is the Ontario Power Commission taking up this challenge. The electric company. Ok, fine. Let’s not be limited to the idea that the official broadcasting corporation should be limited to only broadcasting, or that the power company should be limited to supplying electricity. In Toronto’s case, the wi-fi connectivity is coming as a side-effect of the new power meters, which will broadcast their information using this network. So this is an added benefit. But Toronto is not Canada, and Toronto already has the infrastructure to support widely available broadband internet access. My point is that the rest of the country does not, and the CBC is uniquely mandated to take this up if they so chose.
As it is, the CBC is stuck in the old media models, of television and radio, while treating the internet and such connectivity as an afterthought. I for one don’t understand why their radio programs, which are free to listen to when broadcast through the air, become commodities to be bought, sold, controlled afterward, so that programs like Ideas get a ‘best of’ treatment for the podcast, dolled out on a week to week basis. The CBC archive should be openly available to download. Haven’t we already paid of this content through inadequate allocation of public funds and the patience to sit through McCain food ads?
As it is, what is available on the CBC Archive webpage has been edited – selected and packaged and available only if you use Windows Player, eliminating many Mac users who probably make up the right audience for such content – cultural workers who could really use this content. This web-page was set up in 2003, reflects a corporate relationship with Microsoft which is counter to the public-good (they should be taking advantage of open-source software), and is now obsolete in light of YouTube and Google Video’s use (and thus, standardization) of Flash video, which can be played on anything.
3. Rights
It’s come up before that the CBC cannot treat its archives the way most of us would like because of the contracts signed with the performers etc, entitling them to fees for re-broadcasting, fees which the CBC cannot afford. This is an intolerable situation and something needs to be done about this.
4. Vision
In short my vision for the CBC is the following: as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they should invest in contemporary broadcasting of wi-fi so that internet connectivity from sea to sea is possible. As a public institution, it makes more sense for us to collectively pool our resources (through the usual proper funding allocation derived from tax revenue) so that individuals aren’t burdened with the costs of bringing satellite internet hookups to the lake-shore cottages of the country. As a public broadcaster, they should feel free to program a wide variety of material that reflects the interests and cultures of this country: enough of the white-bread mainstream hockey Shania Twain specials. Where does the CBC reflect the Indo-Canadian perspective? How does the CBC reflect the Aboriginal perspective? With 24 hours in a day, there’s room for 24 different one-hour shows, or 48 different half-hour shows. Further, with the internet, available through their coast-to-coast wi-fi network, they could have internet-only programs. The CBC should have one of the richest server farms in the country, loaded up with their digitized archives, so that fifty years of broadcast history is available to historians and curious citizens. In the Age of the Internet, there should be no excuse for ignorance and none for lack of historical perspective. Such conditions exist today because for too long information has been controlled by editorial shaping, itself not a bad thing (in light of criticisms of Wikipedia) but one where bias can’t often be easily unmasked.
The CBC of the 21st Century should reflect the interests of a well-rounded, highly learned population. George Stroumboulopoulos is in the unfortunate position of being the poster boy for the CBC’s own sense of cultural inadequacy, a sense that can only exist by treating the Canadian public as only being interested in superficiality, rather than acknowledging their appetite for things which help them grow as individuals and further an in-depth understanding of what’s happening in the world.
Finally, to end on a positive note:
5. CBC Radio 3
Is a success on all these counts. Radio show, podcast, esoteric programming, the hint that the host is familiar with such subversive things as drug use and gay erotica (that is, he need not be gay to be cool with its existence), CBC3 shows that CBC knows how to do this. It need not be constrained by limited thinking or a need to broadly appeal to hockey fans. More programing like CBC3 would help the corporation become the 21st Century institution it is destined to be.
Interestingly, one of the oldest guidelines for sales and marketing in any medium is to sell the benefits, not the features, so we shouldn’t really have to harp on this here. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it. Of course, the more bad writing you push on your users, the more you train them to disregard your message in general. Useless content doesn’t just annoy people; it’s a leading cause of lost sales. (source)
Yesterday I lived in a pre-millennial dream of the future. I spent the day going over my pictures and other files on a computer far more advanced than was available in the 1990s. I watched a video clip on YouTube and downloaded one to my hardrive. A delivery in the afternoon dropped off the municipality’s new compost bins. Unpacking this revealed numerous reading materials and a DVD to watch. I placed one of the enclosed biodegradable plastic bags in the new kitchen bin and threw away my first plum pit.
Later I went to the grocery store to get some things (like soy-based coffee cream, since this morning I used my father’s lactose free skim milk) so off I went to the grocery store, where I got the stuff ???? new coffee filters (unbleached ‘organic’), Jiff crunchy peanut butter, some canola oil, and the Silk soy-cream. The 1-8 items lane was closed so I went through the self-checkout. Punch the buttons on the screen, scan the items, swipe the card and key in your personal code. It’s as if I’m writing for a futurist design magazine in 1987 as I type this now. Then it’s home, and TV watching ???? Simon Schama’s History of Britain episode 2: ‘Conquest’ which I borrowed from the library.
Afterward, going around the channels, I came across the Frontline episode from earlier this year on the Iraqi insurgency, and so was thrust into the middle of this early 21st Century war and political reality. This was obviously re-broadcast due to the assassination of al-Zarqawi last Wednesday. After this, I found CBC’s The National that had a story on the Supreme Court hearing a case about these security certificates; this story was followed by a mournful press conference featuring the two men in England who were mistakenly arrested on suspicion that they were building a chemical weapon. Both men had shaven heads and long beards. All of this drove home the fact that our time is strangely polarized between Muslims and whatever the fuck the rest of us are.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Ottawa was Michael Ignatieff. Earlier in the day I saw him awkwardly read from a speech in the House of Commons, and with his academic background, the speech was well researched and well argued. Although, as an MP he lacked the charisma he’s shown at other podiums, where’s he’s prone to break up his points by telling us what he’s told us (‘I’ve mentioned this … and that…’). He was arguing against Bill C-10, an act to implement mandatory minimum sentences. He was answered by the Conservative MP from Peterborough, who quoted Julian Fantino’s blustering about ‘hug-a-thug’ policies, making this MP look like little more than a hot-head. His over-sized body also made an impression of being a somewhat stupid bovine. The Hansard doesn’t register the change in tone of this MP’s voice, which put quotes around ‘hug-a-thug’ and ‘paradigm’ the later as if to mock Ignatieff’s inteligence and background.
Ignatieff responded as one does when one is tired of stupidity, and went over his points, saying that the Liberal policies during the 1990s did not contribute to a ‘hug-a-thug’ mentality, but that the stats clearly show a reduction in crime overall during this period. Afterward, an MP from Quebec, a Bloc Quebecois, complimented the speech in the way that one does when one is impressed and trying to encourage someone who’s been unfairly attacked by a bully, showing sympathy and mentioning how well researched it was, directing a question to Ignatieff about it all.
I was very impressed myself and dearly hope he becomes Prime Minister ???? because here was an example of a intelligent voice ‘raising the level of debate’. The MP from Peterborough suddenly seemed so old fashioned, a symptom of the raucous, dysfunctional, and stupid Parliments that have produced little to be proud of and a lot to be bored and unimpressed by. Ignatieff bringing brains to Parliament was another way in which I felt yesterday to be living in the 21st Century.
Later in the day, the house voted on wether to send C-10 to second reading. Ignatieff and M???nard (the BQ MP) voted against it, but it nevertheless carried at 157-116.
Wednesday 12 June 1996. Now the day before, with the landlord shit, I made a call for an appointment with our landlord Mr. S. So I got up at 12.30, and at 1.10 was out the door, to Duke St, where I got some money and then caught a bus to go to Fairview. The appointment was at 2pm, but at 2 I was at the mall, and since I would be a half-hour late, I called and rescheduled for the next day. So I took the number 1 bus back, getting off at Oxford, to go to the Kings College Library. What a beautiful place! I’m not really one for architecture, but that place was awesome. There, I borrowed Michelangelo’s poems, and then walked home. To class and I did a weekly brief, but it couldn’t print, and I tried and tried and gave up. After class, home with music and Michelangelo’s poems and candlelight to save power. This was a bad day, overcast, me tired, and I concluded that day with the thought that I should never have even gotten up. It was one of those days.
That night I dreamt I was in junior high school again, in Grade 7, and we had these projects we had been working on. There was a boy, we called him Artaud, and he was a silent, moody fellow, anti-social and unknown. Actually I found out a little later that Artaud was a girl, a cute one to. The day came to present her report. I was given a stop watch, to time it. I pressed the start button and dropped it to the floor. Artaud didn’t say a word – more moodiness I thought instantly, but immidately someone jumped onto her chair and applauded enthusiastically. And then I got it, and I too jumped on my chair with screams of bravo! The moodiness – it had all been a grand performance art peice, and that had been her project. Her statement was that ‘alone you are more with people than you are when you’re social,’ as was exemplified in that, after me, the whole class got it and we all cheered her and supported her. Alone she was supported. Had she been part of the crowd, she would have not been supported. Like pegs in a peg board, if one falls, the others still carry the burden and cannot help her, but alone, she is supported by the plank underneath.
So afterwards we were in the cafeteria her and I, and we talked. She was now enormously cute to me, and she had gorgeous jet black hair, straight, falling past her shoulders, and it had a silky sheen. I was facinated by her, by the genius of her project, and she was facinated also by me, saying I was intelligent and very creative. We spoke French to each other at one point. But alas , as it always happens, I woke up, her face imprinted on my mind. I also dreamt of J. that night, but I always do anyway so I don’t remember details.
~
Ten years ago I sat in a dark room, reading my Michelangelo poems after class. I was alone, I put the radio on, and listened to CBC. Did I strum the guitar? Probably, trying to learn the chord positions. Was the chair a rocking chair? For some reason I think so, but then, what happened to it, and where did it come from?Ten years later it’s a day spent with the canvases that were then unpainted, a day spent with a new digital camera that I hadn’t yet heard of, snapping pictures to download and process using the techniques I learned in art school, which I would be beginning in three months. But that night I did not know any of this, and I was sad, so I wrote: ‘This was a bad day, overcast, me tired, and I concluded that day with the thought that I should never have even gotten up. It was one of those days.’I did not yet know how the memory of that afternoon’s walk would stay with me, and how by the end of the year I would return to the grounds of Kings College to take photographs of the old trees and the fa????ade of the library, which I’d been too and had appreciated. I did not know that in ten years I would glimpse one of those photographs and be reminded that I had gone back in November, having found out about it in June.Nor did I know how the memory of that afternoon’s walk would become my mental-visual marker defining the year, the leaves glistening as they were with late afternoon sunlight breaking through the otherwise gray sky of the day – this shininess signaling for me a new turn of events in my life and it the decade – it was all there, the misery of the early half of the 1990s, and the brilliance of the later part.
What follows is my 2001 correspondence with W. Warren Wagar, who died in November 2004, and whose book, A Short History of the Future provided me with much food for thought during the period I was reading it. (And anyone who knows me might remember how I went on about it during 2000-2001).
———–
1.From: Timothy Comeau
To: W. Warren Wagar
Date: Apr 10 2001 – 9:40pm
Subject: A Short History of the Future questions
Dear Mister Wagar,I’m aware that you follow and contribute to the WSN forum, but since this mostly involves questions about your book, I wanted to write to you directly.
I am an artist in Toronto who first read your book, A Short History of the Future last summer and have found it both endlessly facinating and very entertaining. I am outside of the academies now, and have conducted a sort of independent study of the text in my spare time. Understandably, you can imagine that I find the passages dealing with art in the future to be of particular interest. I’m wondering if you could answer some questions I have.
SUBSTANIALISM
Lately, I have been most intrigued with the substantialist art of the Commonwealth. On the weekend it occured to me that what you describe as substantialism is a form of renewed humanism, (you do mention “integral humanism” but this seems to be more of a political thing than spiritual) a belief of man’s purpose arising from the scientific discoveries of cosmology and genetics. I am beginning to see what you describe as neorealist art celebrating the common person in terms of what occurred in the late Middle Ages, when medivael art achieved a new realism and incorporated a sense of the divine with that of the human – and which we call the Renaissance. (The Renaissance being a rebirth of ancient learning, but isn’t our own time in the midsts of a new re-birth, with our archaeological discoveries re-infusing our culture with knowledge of Lascaux and Chauvet?)
In attempting to describe what a “social realist” substantialist painting might look like to a friend, I pointed out the work of the BC artist Chris Woods (-albeit his paintings explore consumerism). Are you familiar with his work? (They can be viewed here: http://www.dianefarrisgallery.com/artist/woods/ )
ART IN 2200
In the autonomous society, where critics lament fossil art and that artists reject most of post modernism and modernism in favor of “simpler” forms: I have interpreted this to be conducive to the democratic infusion that the Commonwealth gave humanity, in line with the Preamble. Are medieval and folk art practiced because it is of the people? I have interpreted the rejection of pomo and mod based upon their consumerist and capitialist aspects, which I guess would vanish in the Catastrophe right?
As an artist, I am too often surrounded by the proverbial Philistines that I find anyone outside of the art discipline who talks about it as intelligently as you do to be a fellow conspirator – and I’m curious as to what your tastes are with regard to contemporary art, and what your background is with regard to its study. My own experience with professors in university was that they didn’t like to answer such questions, but as an historian of world politics, I am curious about how you see art intersecting the world system.
So, I’m wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on these ideas.
Finally, I just wanted to express how much I like the book. I especially like the format of incorporating letters and diary entries to flesh out the historical narrative. Eduardo Mistral Ortiz’s Diary entry is one of my favorites.
Thanks for your time,
Timothy Comeau
———–
2.From: W. Warren Wagar
To: Timothy Comeau
Date: Apr 11 2001 – 6:47pm
Re: A Short History of the Future questions
Dear Timothy Comeau,
Many thanks for your e-mail of yesterday. I’m glad that you found my book
of interest, but almost embarrassed that its few slender passages on the
arts could mean something to a working artist. By trade I am an
intellectual and cultural historian, so I know a little about a lot, but my
speculations about the arts of the future are based more on brave ignorance
than any sort of knowledge in depth. In my own personal life, the only art
form I know well is classical music, mostly of the period since 1880. My
comments follow.
At 09:40 PM 4/10/01 -0400, you wrote:
> Dear Mister Wagar, I’m aware that you follow and contribute to the
>WSN forum, but since this mostly involves questions about your book, I
>wanted to write to you directly. I am an artist in Toronto who first read
> your book, A Short History of the Future last summer and have found it
>both endlessly fascinating and very entertaining. I am outside of the
>academies now, and have conducted a sort of independent study of the text
>in my spare time. Understandably, you can imagine that I find the passages
>dealing with art in the future to be of particular interest. I’m wondering
>if you could answer some questions I have. SUBSTANIALISM a belief of
>man’s purpose arising from the scientific discoveries of cosmology and
>genetics. I am beginning to see what you describe as neorealist art
>celebrating the common person in terms of what occurred in the late Middle
>Ages, when medieval art achieved a new realism and incorporated a sense of
>the divine with that of the human – and which we call the Renaissance.
>(The Renaissance being a rebirth of ancient learning, but isn’t our own
>time in the midsts of a new re-birth, with our archaeological discoveries
>re-infusing our culture with knowledge of Lascaux and Chauvet?) In
>attempting to describe what a “social realist” substantialist painting
>might look like to a friend, I pointed out the work of the BC artist Chris
>Woods (-albeit his paintings explore consumerism). Are you familiar with
>his work? (They can be viewed here:
>http://www.dianefarrisgallery.com/artist/woods/) ART IN 2200
>practiced because it is of the people? I have interpreted the rejection of
>pomo and mod based upon their consumerist and capitialist aspects, which I
>guess would vanish in the Catastrophe right?
“Substantialism” is my version of the dialectical materialism of Marx &
Engels as revised by the French Marxist Jean Jaures. It argues that the
evolution of human consciousness has brought with it a new dimension of
being–“trans-being”–capable of repealing the laws of pre-human nature and
constructing a higher order of substance, a conscious, willing substance
that can make and re-make itself. The problem with modernism and pomo
alike is that they not only succumb to capitalist consumerism but also
erect an artificial barrier between the artist and his/her society. Art
becomes something produced only for other artists, a cop-out whereby
humankind at large is deliberately left in the dust. The reproduction of
this art takes full advantage of the mechanisms of the market-place,
simultaneously mocking and exploiting the hapless consumer, who is
simultaneously angered and humiliated by its seeming unintelligibility.
By contrast, art under the Commonwealth would become democratized and
would celebrate what all of us have in common. This happened, before, in
the art movements of the second half of the 19th Century, with the realism
of Courbet and the impressionism of Manet and all their followers; even
the post-impressionists (Van Gogh, Gauguin) eventually found a broad public
able to connect with their sensibility. All of this work is an art of
common humanity. The form that it would take a century from now is of
course unguessable.
world politics, I am
>curious about how you see art intersecting the world system. So, I’m
>wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on these ideas.
Several lines of your letter seem to be missing here. I would just add
that in the “House of Earth,” I anticipate the arts taking on a greater
variety of forms and media of expression, in keeping with the greater
variety, freedom, and complexity of life in such a heterodox culture. But
again, the arts would grow out of communal life, not a standardized
metropolinized “one size fits all” life.
Somewhere I think you also asked me about my own preferences. I feel the
strongest connection to the art of the second half of the 19th Century and
the first half of the 20th, through Picasso and Magritte. My musical
tastes are even narrower, essentially the music of the post-Wagnerian
generation, circa 1880-1920. My favorite composers are Gustav Mahler and
the little-known English composer Frederick Delius. Does any of this “make
sense”? You tell me!
Cheers,
Warren Wagar
———–
3.From: Timothy Comeau
To: W. Warren Wagar
Subject: Thank you for answering
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 22:48:11 -0400
Thank you for responding. You have given me a lot more to think about!
My own take on art history is whereas academic history is a narrative of recorded events, art history offers a record the psychology of the times. I sometimes define an artist as a “psychological historian”. That’s why I appreciate your inclusion of “a short art history of the future”. It’s one thing to be taught that World War I was the first industrial, mechanized war, it’s other to be taught that due to the medical advances of the time, people were surviving injuries that would have previously killed them, which was greatly shocking to the people of the day, to see the maimed “living monsters” as they thought of them, and this in turn is represented in German expressionism of the 20s(Grosz, Beckman).(I realize that’s somewhat simplistic, but I think it illustrates quite well what I am talking about – and it’s how I understand the nihilism of Leroy du Rien).
As it is, I have so far only had a vague working knowledge of Courbet and the 19th Century, but now I’m much more interested. From “the catching up,” I’ve done over the past few days, I can see what you wrote about with greater clarity. It does make a lot of sense.
I admit that my preferences lie more toward what is being done now, the contemporary art of today’s galleries and prizes. But I fully agree with your statements in your letter, art being something produced for other artists (and hence my interest in it – your point exactly) a cop-out
leaving humankind behind. My own take on this is a result of what you call “credicide” in the book.
But it’s also true that art is in a double bind. It seeks to criticize the contemporary, while being entrenched with the consumerist system. It is constantly bitting the hand that feeds it. Art exists in opposition to popular culture -as it has now for almost 150 years. As as admirer of
classical music, you see exactly what I’m talking about when trying to find the few radio stations that play it in the midst of all the other Top 40 stuff. But most people don’t appreciate classical music because for a variety of reasons they don’t invest the time to appreciate it, preffering the quick pop medleys to provide a soundtrack to their lives. Classical musicians make no apologies for not “dumbing down,” and neither do contemporary artists.
I have often thought however, that some of today’s contemporary art is comparable to that of the post impressionists: that they too will “eventually [find] a broad public”. But your book gave me a new way of looking at it all, with contemporary art’s connection to consumerism and capitalism that is by no means a guaranteed economic system. So I thank you for that.
Timothy Comeau
———–
4.From: W. Warren Wagar
To: Timothy Comeau
Subject: Re: Thank you for answering
And thanks for your further comments. I know what you mean about
how contemporary art and music takes time to reach a broader public. In a
sense that’s the whole story of the last two centuries, ever since the
invention of the “avant-garde.” Certainly some of the work done in the
last 50 years or so will eventually find an audience outside the ranks of
its initiates, but it would be a mistake to rely too heavily on the
patterns of the past. Abstract expressionism, for example, still comes
across as more curious than expressive. Dada is still a vast joke,
although widely emulated by the contemporary avant-garde. And the serial
music of the 1940s to 1960s, so universally acclaimed by the music
professors of the period, still falls on deaf ears. Yet without a vibrant
living art, culture can petrify and survive only as museum pieces fit only
for reverence. Wags like to refer to the Met in Lincoln Center as the
Metropolitan Museum of Opera, a showcase for Handel, Mozart, Rossini,
Wagner, and Verdi, staged over and over again. The same goes for all past
great work. No wonder so much of postmodernism consists of quotation. As
someone says in A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, “all late culture is
quotation.” What a terrifying thought! (And now, lord help me, I’m
quoting myself.)But much of the blame falls on the academy, I am convinced. Just
as science and technology have become more and more minutely specialized
and professionalized, so the arts have been captured, catalogued,
classified, critiqued, and endlessly subdivided by the academicians. I
was on a doctoral committee recently for a novelist. He got his Ph.D.
with a science-fiction novel. And his partner was getting a Ph.D. for
critiquing gay poetry. Professors tell you whether you’re any good. Even
the writing of history (my field) has lost most of its grace and force
thanks to submission to the canons of professionalism. I have been a
professional academic for 43 years now, and sometimes I feel like a Greek
slave teaching Aristotle to a Roman patrician or a mandarin in the
neo-Confucian court of a Chinese emperor. Of course my “credentials” also
gave me the freedom to write A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, so perhaps I
shouldn’t complain.
Enough rambling. Best wishes!
———–
Shortly after this correspondence I went out and bought Phaidon’s book on Courbet and read it within a month, furthering my understanding not only of Realism, but leading to the work of Baudelaire as well. Two years before I had borrowed this book from the NSCAD library, but it didn’t hold my interest at the time.
From: steven.laurie
To: timothy c.
Date: May 30, 2006 7:18 PM
Subject: Re: Article
Timothy
I read the article about my work or press release. I found it interesting. I
can see what you are getting at but I have no interest in mocking the subject
matter i am dealing with. Also I agree that masculinity or “manliness” is not
entirely a performance.
Thanks for your comments though. I appreciate the time you took. I would like
to hear more of what you think on this issue.
Psychopaths
In today’s Globe and Mail, ‘Focus’ section, there’s an article called ‘The Psychopath in the Corner Office’ about everyday psychopathic people who rise to positions of power. Mostly because the way the business world is, their ruthlessness is rewarded. These types of articles on ‘everyday psychopaths’ pop up every year or so. This stat:
In Prof. Hare’s estimation, the average incidence of psychopathy in North America is 1% of the population. That would mean there are about 300,000 psychopaths in Canada – and close to 3000 reading this very newspaper today. Perhaps you know one. Or are one.
One percent of the population begins to suggest that this is a normal variety of mind, a way they once characterized autism in a previous article from about two or three years ago.
This article on autism began by suggesting that the autistic mind was a result of natural selection – part of the variety of human being. Which is a decent way of thinking about it. ‘Psychopathy,’ writes the article’s author, Alexandra Gill,’…is a personality disorder characterized by a deep lack of conscience, empathy and compassion’.
With my empathy toward psychopaths activated, I wrote this letter to the editor:
From: Timothy Comeau
To: Letters@globeandmail.com
Date: May 27, 2006 4:45 PM
Subject: re: psychopath articleI read the article on corporate (and other) psychopaths with interest but grew concerned as to the validity of intensive background checks to prevent psychopaths from reaching positions to wreak havoc. Wouldn’t extensive screening lead to making these people unemployable and thereby reducing them to a life of welfare and poverty, where they’d become embittered and even more dangerous? As psychopaths are characterized by a deep lack of empathy and compassion, they’d be victimized by our own lack of empathy and compassion toward them. As the article suggests, our society is too geared toward the appreciation of ruthlessness that it comes as no surprise that so many seem to be high up in the food chain, and perhaps are already occupying their proper social roles.
You once ran an article on autism in which it was suggested that the autistic mind is the result of natural selection – producing variety amongst us. A similar suggestion about the psychopathic mind would have been warranted. But it’s funny that we treat autistics so poorly compared to psychopaths, especially considering that the autistics of the past are probably responsible for so many of our great endeavors while the psychopaths have given us our worst.
Timothy Comeau
As I re-read that now, I see that I should have also added that the way we continue to treat the poor is evidence of our own psychopathic society.
Manliness I
There was another article in today’s paper that I appreciated, about home-grown initiation rites. Also found in the ‘Focus’ section, and titled, ‘Saying goodbye to childhood’, it was about a young chap (Scott) who turned 16 and had an unusual birthday party.
Scott’s parents had organized an unofficial rite of passage to initiate their son into manhood. They invited a group of male friends and relatives they respected to talk to their son about what it means to become a man.
Scott’s mother goes on to say that she wanted something more than the usual ways we ‘self-initiate’.
Those who have studied life transitions agree that rites of passage are important – even essential – for adolescents becoming adults. ‘It doesn’t matter what we call it […] if adults don’t respond, adolescents will initiate themselves, often [but] not always, in destructive ways’. Binge drinking, experimenting with drugs or having sex are some of the ways teens in our society self-initiate.
It’s funny that needs saying, as if written for pre-adolescents, ignoring that everyone else not in question has gone through being a teenager, and should be able to remember how important it was to get laid or drunk for the first time.
The fellow quoted above is Ron Grimes, who wrote a book called Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage and goes on to say therein that ‘whatever the reason, the past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the construction of rites of passage’. For Scott, this group of men numbered about twelve: a couple of neighbors, the fathers of some of his friends, is gay uncle with his partner. ‘Few of them knew each other, yet they were asked to share some personal experiences and insights into what it means to be a man’.
‘I wanted him to come away with the idea that being a man is honouring all aspects of his person; the physical, the mental, the spiritual and the emotional,’ [Scott’s father] says.He adds that he didn’t really learn how to live his life as a man until he was about 40 years old and attended a men’s-only weekend workshop in Berkeley, Calif. ‘It was like an initiation. It helped me realize what I missed out on … In my family, there wasn’t much talk about being a man. There wasn’t much discussion about my life beyond school’.
As for what the men told Scott…
the men talked about the necessity of doing the right thing, as hard as that may be, staying true to yourself and not following the crowd, finding something important outside of yourself and contributing to it. And when it comes to sex, being in a committed relationship is better than casual sex.
As Scott’s Mom says, she couldn’t pay someone to say such things. She saw that the following day he had a spring in his step and a pride in himself.
According to [Scott’s mom] society as a whole suffers from young adults being, as she calls it ‘uninitiated’. ‘Lots of teens don’t want to become men or women. We all known of 50 year old ‘boys’ who never said goodbye to their childhood because they weren’t shepherded,’ she says.A new books suggests that she might be on to something. In researching The Boomerang Age: Transitions to Adulthood in Families Simon Fraser University sociologist Barbara Mitchell interviewed 2000 adults from 19 to 35 years old in the greater Vancouver area who had either left home and come back, or never left at all. The majority said their were in their parent’s homes for economic reasons, but about 25% of them (mainly young men) said they were still at home because they weren’t psychologically or emotionally ready to leave.
A lot of the so-called artists I know/knew don’t want to be men or women either.
Manliness II
There appears to be something in the air though, since I’ve noticed attitudes toward manliness are up for discussion. The rise of ‘metrosexuality’ a couple of years ago caused a lot of talk and about 15 years ago there was a lot of talk too about these types of men-only circles (like what Scott’s dad must have gone too) where’d they go out to the woods and howl.
As a young man, trying to find my way without the benefit of young Scott’s experience, and dissatisfied with the initiations I did go through of the usual binge drinking and virginity-loss, I find that I’m also both intrigued and bothered by how the popular ideas about being a man are simply degrading. Why is it, for example, that fast food restaurants try to sell hamburgers by appealing to a fucked-up sense of manliness?
There used to be Harvey’s commercials that did this, and currently there’s a Burger King commercial I’ve seen, with a bunch of men walking tall and proud because they got their meat sandwich. Further, there are those Bud Light commercials advertising a coupon for steaks. WTF?
Recently, a book was published by Harvey Mansfield called Manliness (and this is what comes up when you Google that term as the first result, in addition to its reviews). All the reviews point out Mansfield’s harping against feminists and how, as Mark Kingwell said in his Globe and Mail review some time ago (March 18th, from which I paraphrase), ‘how it manages to offend all sorts of people at once’.
It’s almost to begin to imply that being a man today, or claiming to be one, is to be offensive. Which brings up Aristotle, who’s merely offensive because he’s a Greek Philosopher. That is, Artistotle is a dead white male, a pejorative phrase which Wikipedia tells us:
is a rhetorical device used to deride the emphasis on Western civilization in schools […]. The term was used pejoratively in the early 1990s by those advocating multicultural studies. The term finds widespread usage among members of the educational establishment who see students as agents of social change.
Why is that, to expand our minds and our study to something beyond our immediate context (such as Western Civilization and its heritage) we have to first insult it, or imply that it is offensive?
Nevertheless, it was in Kingwell’s review that I was alerted to Artistotle’s list of manly attributes, found in his Niomachean Ethics.
Ethics are the application of morality, and morality we should consider not as something religious or superstitious but as simply the collection of ideas we have about living a good life. For some, enjoying a cup of tea before bed time is part of a good life, and thus is a moral action, and it thus follows that not buying tea is unethical. For many, enjoying a pint on a patio with friends is a part of a good life, and therefore it would be unethical to shut down all the bars or to quit drinking. Because I’m deeply interested in the variety of moral worlds that you find once you get past the idea that morality has something to do with Jesus (in that sense, it merely represents The Bible’s idea about what a good life is because it’s God’s idea about how we should live our lives), I’m interested in how Artistotle formulated his ideas about what a good Greek life was for a man 2300 years ago.
By Googling for it, I did come across this article earlier this week, written by an apparently young fellow in the States named Jason Roberts who’s dividing time between college and the military according to the posted profile. One almost suspects by this fellow’s way of writing and infatuation with the Classical past (in addition to a seemingly thinly-veiled misogyny) that he hasn’t yet been initiated the traditional way into manliness through sex.
However, he presents Aristotle’s thoughts on being a man through a blockquote from The Niomachean Ethics which we can break down like this –
A man, according to Aristotle, is one who is:
confident in the face of danger
moderate in his use and enjoyment of opulent things
magnanimous in estimation of his own worth
ambitious in his desire of honor
patient in response and dealings with his passions
truthful in his life and dealings with others
righteously indignant when done wrong
and just towards himself and others.
He paints a beautiful portrait of this person, saying that this man:
“????does not take petty risks
nor does he court danger
because there are few things that he values highly
but he takes great risks
and when he faces danger he is unsparing of his life
because to him there are some circumstances in which it is not worth living
he is bound to????speak and act straightforwardly????and
he cannot bear to live in dependence upon somebody else
he does not nurse resentment
In troubles that are unavoidable or of minor importance he is the last person to complain or ask for help
his gait is measured, his voice deep, his speech unhurried.????
Mr. Roberts then writes (interspersed with my italicized comments delimitated by ‘//’):
But today, every single element of manliness that Aristotle described is under attack. The 1960’s ushered in the era of the Feminists. Unlike intellectual trends, feminism became a cultural trend. But not only was their view of womanliness skewed, their view of manliness was also dangerously wrong. Sadly, this view has come to dominate our culture, beit in the form of the metrosexual, the effeminate man, or the man in touch with his feminine side.
// I consider myself to have a healthy dose of metrosexuality, so that I at least have a fashion sense, unlike the fellows you see in the fast-food stereotypes.
Instead of a man who is courageous and confident in facing reality, men are now told that it is okay to be soft and cowardly.
// Agree
Instead of a man who is moderate, men are now told to indulge themselves in the luxuries of life; to spend huge sums on fashionable clothes, stylish haircuts, and manicures.
// I also agree this isn’t admirable
Instead of a man who is magnanimous, men are now told to be pusillanimous; to apologize for their greatness and expound upon their defects.
// ‘pusillanimous’ is defined as: ‘lacking courage and resolution : marked by contemptible timidity’. Is a contraction of this word from whence we get ‘pussy’? In other words, men are now told to be pussies, to apologize for their greatness (in whatever way they are great I suppose – great handymen, with the barbecue, as lovers? – ) and expound on their defects: geesh is that ever true. We trade stories of misery just not seem better than other people.
Instead of a man who is ambitious in his desire of honor, men are now told to seek the lowly and to be meek. Instead of a man who is patient in response to his passions, men are now told to cry uncontrollably, to let their emotions pour out. Instead of a man who is truthful, men are now told that white lies are okay, and that it is better to flatter than to “offend”. Instead of a man who is righteously indignant, men are now told to turn the other cheek; to forgive and forget; to be compassionate to our worst enemies.
// I agree with all of this up until the dig at compassion. Showing compassion to one’s enemies is something only a strong person can do. We see it even in the way Alexander the Great treated his defeated enemies. Showing compassion makes us better than psychopaths.
And instead of a man who is just, men are now told to trade favors, to barter for social acceptance, to achieve by means of social connections, to be tolerant of all opinions, and to love thy neighbor as thyself.
// ‘to love thy neighbor …’ means that true Christians are pussies and have been since the fall of the Roman Empire? This dig begins to get at Nietzche’s ideas about a Master and a Slave Morality, the later of course being the ‘good life ideas’ of the Christians.
This interests me because of my developing ideas about being a man in this society where feminism has been wonderfully successful, and as I grow away from the way I felt about patriarchy at age 25.
My visceral loathing for Bush II began with that disgust for patriarchy, but I should develop this to say that patriarchy is and was repulsive to me because of it’s lunk-headed stupidity, especially in the face of oppression and environmental destruction. It is further exemplified by the way the media uses fat and stupid men in sitcoms to be ‘everyman’ who find a sense of manliness through the eating of meat. Overweight, unhealthy men who obsess over a food which should be a rarity, (not a staple) represent ‘everyman’? I don’t think so. There is also an unfornuate characteristic of patriarchy that glorifies in combat and competition, which is why I could tell during the debates Bush had with Al Gore in 2000 that he’d get the country into a war somehow, since he was such a patriarchial figure-head.
Why are sophisticated wine-snobs never represented on sitcoms or commercials without also being pusillanimous at the same time? Think of Frasier on the eponymous sitcom and his brother Myles. Think of how Myles is also the name of the character in the 2004 film Sideways, the sophisticated writer and wine-snob who is also timid and emotionally devastated by his divorce, while his friend Jack is the lunk-headed fun-loving (probably meat-eating) fellow out to get laid before his wedding day, behaving in a way that is unethical in more than one moral context.
The stupid men stereotypes are the ones prone to be defended by women who should know better (as the sitcom men where once for me) as ‘representing everyman’. Is this because it conforms most readily to their anti-masculine ideology?
This ideology permeates the art world. Take this press-release from last September for example, with my emphasis:
Celebratory Angst: Riggin’ the Exhaust
Steven LaurieUniversity of Western Ontario MFA Thesis Exhibition
Location: ArtLab (UWO Campus/ Visual Arts Building)
Dates of Exhibition: September 16 – 30
Opening Reception: Friday, September 16, 5-7 pm
Description of Exhibition:
Through the use of the suburban backyard/garage as a platform, I am interested in the ideas, images, and behaviors that are culturally recognized as ‘normative’ masculine qualities, and how they influence gender performance. This body of work makes use of the contradictions found within gender-based constructs while attempting to critically address the relationship between labor and leisure and the performances of the everyday.
My current studio practice involves the modification and tuning of gas powered machines that meld the impetuous activities of burning rubber and revving with the aspects of utility and desire. Through isolating and amplifying particular actions, stereotypes and clich???s usually assigned to a masculine proviso, I develop hyper-masculine tools that emphasize the relationship between the male body, extension/attachment and exhibitionism. By using steel, readily available machine parts and exhaust tips I am exploring the intricate ideas of masculinity through the critical perspectives of anxiety and celebration.
My objections to this are that I don’t think gender is any more a performance than sex – that is, the ‘performance’ is very much preprogrammed. We thrust our hips therein instinctively, not because we took fucking lessons. The so called ‘normative’ of male behavior is also very much instinctive, but includes the behaviour of intelligent and sophisticated men, not just the fools, of that common majority that creates the ‘normative’ idea in the first place.
So, Mr. Artist is interested in it, and that means what? – he does a bunch of stuff mocking the subject matter. Imagine if anthropologists, instead of writing descriptive papers and documenting and archiving the culture, enacted performances that mocked their subjects. ‘I’m a native tribesman, I fuck 12 year old girls, I slaughter wild pigs with my bare hands and I believe in forest spirits’. The girl who hates men does a dance, her face skewed into a ugly pose, as she tried to bring out the primitive brutality of her tribal fellow. The audience sips beer and laughs. Afterward they congratulate her. The art world becomes a bunch of self-satisfied assholes who want to mock and encourage divisiveness.
Through my art-world dealings, I find myself on the defensive at times about being a straight (white) man, and why? I see men degraded all around me today and find that as offensive as what women experienced in the 1950s. What does it mean to be a man today, and why should we put up with feminist degradation? I think this is both a fair question and a fair critique of the environment encouraged by feminists, many of whom would prefer to view gender as a performance rather than something deeply genetic. But this is not to say that type of testosterone shock-jock (who are the male gender’s bimbos who degrade us all) is something acceptable either, but is something uncivilized and barbaric.
This type of research into what could be called conservative patriarchal bullshit is thus leading me to want to read Aristotle’s Niomachean Ethics which as I’ve already said, is part of the larger project of understanding different moral/ethical orders as differing visions of the good life.
Which brings me to Brad Pitt; perhaps he best exemplifies our culture’s considerations of manliness. He certainly leads a good life, at least according to what this culture values. He dated Gwyneth Paltrow when she was marketed as the perfect woman, then he married a TV star when she was considered the perfect woman, and now he’s having a baby with a woman considered to be the sexiest woman alive or some such thing. Beyond his famous good looks he’s wealthy and said to be smart, with an interest in architecture (friends with Frank Gehry no less). And, he’s a vegetarian. When you need a manly man for a movie (which function to advertise a variety of moral visions), who does’t eat ‘mheeet’ Pitt’s your man.
He’s Achilles in 2004’s Troy but he is also Tyler Durden in 1999’s Fight Club, which is perhaps our fucked up culture’s version of the Niomachean Ethics. Fight Club‘s a morality tale that had resonance with me, presenting a vision of a good life based on an anti-consumerist ethic and mocking corporate psychopathy. It is also one that begins to question our society’s ideas about manliness. As in for example, this line
Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is it essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No.
Or, this:
Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
Did not get up till about 10.45 this morning. After breakfast father, Mr. Lay & myself walked to Nordheimer’s hill & back, I had dinner early & left for the Woodbine race at 2 o’clock. Got there shortly after 2.30 sat most of the afternoon in the Press seats in the Grand Stand, where I wrote up the account for the Associated Press. I walked to the betting rings to watch the crowd. I must confess that a mingled feeling of disgust contempt & sadness came over me as I saw the mass of men with apparently no high thoughts or desires wasting or risking what money they might possess. The class are a hard one to deal with. So too, the Society set, poor feeble minded creatures only pleasure to be looked at & to look at others. I did not enjoy the races much. Sent off the account at 6.30, had supper, have been writing since – felt the influence of Mr. Winchester’s sermon.
Of course, today we’d call ‘the Society Set’ celebrities or just plain socialites. However, in the century since this time, we’ve decided that casinos are a worthy way to supplement tax revenue, which, as then, comes from folk of ‘apparently no high thoughts or desires wasting or risking what money they might possess.’
My department occasionally receives self-published books from people who think philosophers, of all people, should want to know the TRUTH. As such, I can say with a certainty that no rambling philosophical treatise is compete without mention of:1. Unified Field Theory which combines electromagnetism with sexual ergons as theorized by Wilhelm Reich!
2. Antimatter and antigravity
3. Monadic collider for analysis of sub-monadic particles!
4. Qualia as Gravitons
5. Exceptions to the incest taboo.
6. Harmonic meditation techniques for world peace
7. Blurbs from Robert Pirsig and the guy who wrote the Tao of Pooh.
8. The secret treatise contained within Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian. Guess what? He actually is.
9. Master race theory is optional, but you can bet you aren’t a member.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:13 PM PST on May 9
From The Satyricon of Petronius (60 AD): with highlights:
Meantime I found it no easy task to overcome my thirst for revenge, and spent half the night in anxious debate. In hopes, however, of beguiling my melancholy and forgetting my wrongs, I rose at dawn and visited all the different colonnades, finally entering a picture gallery, containing admirable paintings in various styles. There I beheld Zeuxis’ handiwork, still unimpaired by the lapse of years, and scanned, not without a certain awe, some sketches of Protogenes’, that vied with Nature herself in their truth of presentment. Then I reverently admired the work of Apelles, of the kind the Greeks call “monochromatic”; for such was the exquisite delicacy and precision with which the figures were outlined, you seemed to see the very soul portrayed. Here was the eagle towering to the sky and bearing Ganymede in its talons. There the fair Hylas, struggling in the embraces of the amorous Naiad. Another work showed Apollo cursing his murderous hand, and bedecking his unstrung lyre with blossoms of the new-sprung hyacinth.
Standing surrounded by these painted images of famous lovers, I ejaculated as if in solitary self-communion, “Love, so it seems, troubles even the gods. Jupiter could discover no fitting object of his passion in heaven, his own domain; but though condescending to earthly amours, yet he wronged no trusting heart. Hylas’ nymph that ravished him would have checked her ardor, had she known Hercules would come to chide her passion. Apollo renewed the memory of his favorite in a flower; and all these fabled lovers had their way without a rival’s interference. But I have taken to my bosom a false-hearted friend more cruel than Lycurgus.”
But lo! while I am thus complaining to the winds of heaven, there entered the colonnade an old white-headed man, with a thought-worn face, that seemed to promise something mysterious and out of the common. Yet his dress was far from imposing, making it evident he belonged to the class of men of letters, so ill-looked upon by the rich. This man now came up to me, saying, “Sir! I am a poet, and I trust of no mean genius, if these crowns mean anything, which I admit unfair partiality often confers on unworthy recipients. ‘Why then,’ you will ask, ‘are you so poorly clad?’ Just because I am a genius; when did love of art ever make a man wealthy?
The sea-borne trafficker gains pelf untold;
The hardy soldier wins his spoil of gold;
The sycophant on Tyrian purple lies;
The base adulterer with Croesus vies.
Learning alone, in shuddering rags arrayed,
Vainly invokes th’ indifferent Muses’ aid!
“No doubt about it; if any man declare himself the foe of every vice, and start boldly on the path of rectitude, in the first place the singularity of his principles makes him odious, for who can approve habits so different from his own? Secondly, men whose one idea is to pile up the dollars cannot bear that others should have a nobler creed than they live by themselves. So they spite all lovers of literature in every possible way, to put them into their proper place–below the money-bags.”
“I cannot understand why poverty is always talent’s sister,” I said, and heaved a sigh.
“You do well,” returned the old man, “to deplore the lot of men of letters.”
“Nay!” I replied, “that was not why I sighed; I have another and a far heavier reason for my sorrow!”–and immediately, following the common propensity of mankind to pour one’s private griefs into another’s ear, I told him all my misfortunes, inveighing particularly against Ascyltos’ perfidy, and ejaculating with many a groan, “Would to heaven my enemy, the cause of my present enforced continence, had any vestige of good feeling left to work upon; but ’tis a hardened sinner, more cunning and astute than the basest pander.”
Pleased by my frankness, the old man tried to comfort me; and in order to divert my melancholy thoughts, told me of an amorous adventure that had once happened to himself.
[…]
Enlivened by this discourse, I now began to question my companion, who was better informed on these points than myself, as to the dates of the different pictures and the subjects of some that baffled me. At the same time I asked him the reason for the supineness of the present day and the utter decay of the highest branches of art, and amongst the rest of painting, which now showed not the smallest vestige of its former excellence.
“It is greed of money,” he replied, “has wrought the change. In early days, when plain worth was still esteemed, the liberal arts flourished, and the chief object of men’s emulation was to ensure no discovery likely to benefit future ages long remaining undeveloped. To this end Democritus extracted the juices of every herb, and spent his life in experimenting, that no virtue of mineral or plant might escape detection. In a similar way Eudoxus grew gray on the summit of a lofty mountain, observing the motions of the stars and firmament, while Chrysippus thrice purged his brain with hellebore, to stimulate its capacity and inventiveness. But to consider the sculptors only,–Lysippus was so absorbed in the modeling of a single figure that he actually perished from lack of food, and Myron, who came near embodying the very souls of men and beasts in bronze, died too poor to find an heir.
“But we, engrossed with wine and women, have not the spirit to appreciate the arts already discovered; we can only criticize Antiquity, and devote all our energies, in precept and practice, to the faults of the old masters. What is become of Dialectic? of Astronomy? of Philosophy, that richly cultivated domain? Who nowadays has ever been known to enter a temple and engage to pay a vow, if only he may attain unto Eloquence, or find the fountain of wisdom? Not even do sound intellect and sound health any longer form the objects of men’s prayers, but before ever they set food on the threshold of the Capitol, they promise lavish offerings, one if he may bury a wealthy relative, another if he may unearth a treasure, another if only he may live to reach his thirty million. The very Senate, the ensample of all that is right and good, is in the habit of promising a thousand pounds of gold to Capitoline Jove, and that no man may be ashamed of the lust of pelf, bribes the very God of Heaven. What wonder then if Painting is in decay, when all, gods and men alike, find a big lump of gold a fairer sight than anything those crack-brained Greek fellows, Apelles and Phidias, ever wrought.
As cultural professionals, you or I should study all the things, regardless of whether they speak to us on a deep personal level. But generally speaking, you only need a couple of paintings, a couple of poems, a couple of pieces of music to last a whole lifetime. I have succeeded if a person walks away with one image, one thought, one realization, one feeling that they can use in their life, even if they can’t remember my name, the names of the pieces, or how many they say. – Bill Viola
Toronto isn’t the best place to live right now. With the two centerpieces of this city’s culture currently undergoing renovations, and with the Power Plant gallery continuing to highlight just how irrelevant and uninteresting most contemporary art is, I find myself bored more often that I’d like to be. But the talk is of a cultural renaissance and the city is looking for some kind of vision for itself. One problem: this is the corporate centre of Canada, and corporations are lousy at vision. Look at advertising – it has become the dominant cultural and visual expression of our society. Pompeii was frozen in time and its frescoes were preserved. Such a disaster in Toronto would only preserve a galaxy of images of vacant expressions and languid poses.And the graffiti. God bless the graffiti. A recent book suggests the ancient cave painting of Europe had more in common to graffiti than they do to religious iconography, which personally makes sense. (However, since we fundamentally know nothing about the cave paintings, they will always be susceptible to fashionable interpretation: a century ago when religion was taken more seriously, they had religious meaning. Now that religion has faded in importance, they’re graffiti. A century from now, a new reading perhaps based on whatever reality is present at that time).
Christopher Hutsul, in today’s Toronto Star, interviewed some people about Toronto’s cultural vision. He spoke to Fiona Smyth, Matthew Teitelbaum (of the AGO) and Sarah Diamond (the new president of OCAD). Why Smyth was chosen to be the voice of Toronto’s artists, I don’t know. I guess he could have picked worse … there are plenty worse. Smyth hasn’t been relevant to the Toronto scene for a decade (at least that’s my understanding). When asked about her vision, Hutsul wrote:
“For painter Fiona Smyth, graffiti should be flat-out decriminalized. ‘Billboards are taking over,’ she says. ‘Every available space is being grabbed by corporations, and graffiti can be a counterpoint to that …. ‘ The art form could extend to our rooftops, which Smyth believes are an untapped resource for gallery space. She imagines a city where rooftops are connected by a network of catwalks and feature sculptures, art pieces and gardens.”
I have some idea of what she’s smoking, but I’d like to point out that artists really need to get off the anti-billboard bandwagon. Only because, we get it. Imagine you want to suggest a new strategy, argue a point, or hell, even get laid. There’s a progression that occurs in proposition, argument and in seduction. You do not belabor the first step. You move forward. Yes billboards suck. Next…..
There’s a self-consciousness at the moment in the Left of what has gone wrong … and this failure to evolve the message is surely one of the problems. Our city is over-corporatized, billboards are part of that, but graffiti is not an antidote to them. Graffiti can be as much of an eyesore … one person’s masterpiece is another’s whack job, and so we need to keep this in mind. I for one like how graffiti throws down some colour on the otherwise gray landscape, shows some imagination.
We shouldn’t even try to understand architects who think raw concrete is lovely, let’s not waste the energy. But let’s think of how there are paint factories in the world capable of producing enough paint to cover the CN Tower if we so chose.
The tower for one is nice enough as it is, but we’re also used to it that way. We are also used to thinking that ancient Greco-Roman architecture was purely white. But it wasn’t – the Greeks and Romans painted their buildings – they seemed to enjoy colour. They seemed to have suffered from the fear of empty spaces known as horror vacui. Yet, in our day and age, the pure white walled room is the temple of contemporary art and culture. The overall message is that colour is bad, somehow not pure, because of the puritan pollution of neo-classicism which still lingers in the mind of the cultural. Rooftops of gardens and sculptures is something they might have done 2000 years ago, but I don’t really think sculpture has much relevance and I further imagine the sculpture would be like the shit atop the poles on Spadina … pure eyesores.
Calling for catwalks and sculpture gardens is just asking for more space to put up advertising kiosks like Derek Sulivan did. Was his project a critique of capitalism, or the suggestion that billboards are ok, as long as they imitate what was done in Europe a century ago?
Teitelbaum suggests expanding the AGO’s exhibitions to outside the space … put stuff up at Union Stn and similar. I suppose he hasn’t walked through BCE place at any time in the past few years, or through that office building on Yonge that had a space Paul Petro used to run. The BCE exhibitions are usually interesting, but ignored by the business people going to and fro. Union Stn wouldn’t work either – the space is too shitty (the Go Train space that is) and that would be your primary audience. People arriving on VIA would be too distracted by their trip to check out art, and no one from downstairs waiting for a Go Train would go upstairs, probably because the show would have stupid hours or be otherwise inaccessible.
The waterfront idea has some merit, but they’d be encroaching on the Power Plant’s territory, and then there’d be a turf war. Power Plant people bitching about the AGO, I can see it now, and it depresses me. But let’s move on to Sarah Diamond, who, it appears, is full of the vigour of naivte. ‘Look at me, I’m the president of an art school! Let’s have a Happening’. Jesus H Christ.
Yes, to reinvigorate our city’s cultural life, let’s go back 40 years, to a time when Henry Moore fell in love with Toronto out of spite. Happenings with scientists. I imagine Power Point presentations on quantum mechanics and relativity theory and oooh, dark matter. A real happening now involves nudity, cocaine, endless kegs, and music that hurts your ears. That’s not something likely to be sanctioned by corporate Canada and its funders.
Diamond goes on to say that arts need to be at the centre and not at the periphery – but they are at the periphery just as much as plumbing is to many of us – because the arts have become a little industry. I mean, if I needed a plumber, I wouldn’t know where to start to find one. It’s hard enough trying to find somebody to fix your computer, let alone your pipes. The arts are the same way. I happen to know lots of artists because I am an artist as well, because that’s my scene. I don’t know any plumbers or computer fix-it people. For Diamond to suggest moving the arts to the centre is the same as the president of plumbing college saying people need to pay more attention to their pipes. Ain’t going to happen darling.
Nor should we have a crowd of artists at Pearson to welcome passengers. Lame lame lame …. I’m not that surprised she got hired on with these splendid ideas. OCAD doesn’t cease to underwelm me (although I was impressed they’d moved their library catalogue to a self-designed Linux system the last time I was there). Artists at Pearson would send a strangely parochial message, suggesting we’re so desperate for other people’s attention that we’re going to do a song and dance and paint them pretty pictures as soon as they get off the plane.
As opposed to a place like New York. You know what New York’s philosophy is don’t you? It’s Fuck You. That’s why people want to go there. Because their amazing, they know it, and because this gives them the self-confidence to be brash and rude and bold. So they can afford to say Fuck You. Toronto: please come see our hobbits on stage! Look at our shiny artists, aren’t we special? When Toronto has the balls to kiss off the rest of the world as we do the rest of Canada (not for nothing we’re so despised) then the world will take notice, find us interesting, and you won’t need artists at the airports. A healthy culture is not a self-conscious culture. Nor is a healthy culture one that looks to Yorkville celebrities as a source of identity, as happens every September.
The article ends with two poets. “Molly Peacock, poetry editor at the Literary Review of Canada, suggests we stamp poetry into every new sidewalk square. Peacock, who helped bring ‘Poetry in Motion’ to the New York transit system, says if this were to happen, we’d be ‘the most marvellously literary city in the world.'”
This would probably make me hate poetry. I like it on the subway, but on sidewalks like this I’d find it oppressive, overwhelming, and a gross validation of text over speech, which isn’t a balance we should be persuaded to topple. If we get all offended by the stupid adverts everywhere, wouldn’t text everywhere underfoot be a similar violation of public space?
The second poet highlights the idea that poets are useless twits who merely have a way with words. “Sonnet L’Abbé believes the key to a more artful city is for people to ‘ease up on the gas’ in the pursuit of economic prosperity and make a ‘personal commitment to loving art. And when I say loving, I mean paying attention to it, getting to know, not just throwing money at it. It’s like a person growing their own artistic flower … If you have enough flowers, then the whole city becomes a garden of people who love and consume and make art.'”
We shouldn’t be asking people who failed chemistry in highschool to suddenly become chemists. ‘Get to know chemistry …’ they’d say, ‘fall in love with the test tube’. Ridiculous. You can’t ask this of people.
But you can try to create an environment where culture is an ambient reality, so that whenever the interests is sparked, they’ll know how to follow it. Recently I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to meet a friend and with time to spare, I dropped into the ROM to check out the Greek artifacts and to familiarize myself with the world of those stories. This is what living in the city means to me – the availability of material for the pursuit of my interests. Libraries, galleries, museums … these are there so that we can grow as individuals, so that we can learn something about the world and what it means to be human.
Gardens and sculptures are lame because they are window dressing, imitations of a style that meant something thousands of years ago, when the statues were of gods or heroes. Exhibitions in transit areas are stupid because those are spaces designed to be moved through… and artists at air ports are foolish because only cultures who are trying to impress the bigger more powerful ones are prone to do something like that.
Toronto is not New York because we don’t have the cultural wealth. Build up the wealth by supporting the artists who work here, and by collecting masterpieces from around the world (and not just from the Anglo-American Empire), and then the city could facilitate cultural individuals. As it is, the city’s best libraries are the university ones, which are limited to the public, and the institutions are more interested in their face lifts.
Canada is a great country and I’m of the opinion that a whole generation of artists and the like are currently working in the city, a generation that will be read about in tomorrow’s history books. Forget Andy Warhol, and Happenings, and all that shit New York did in the 1960s. Toronto’s 1960s moment is right now, and let’s pay attention to those artists if you want to feel like you’re living in a culturally vibrant, exciting, and relevant place.
Gay, au comte Digby en Nouvelle-Ecosse (BOW
2Z0) Canada.
Come project pour la semaine d’ Education nous
asayon de faire de nouvelles connaissance a
travers la mer.
Ou et quand as-ti trouve cette lettre? Qui est tu?
Box 68 Saulnierville
Digby Conty Ton nouvelle [ami]
Timothy Comeau
————————————-
[or, en anglais:]
April 7, 1986
My name is Timothy Comeau.
I am in 5th Grade at Jean-Marie Gay School, in the county of Digby in Nova Scotia (BOW 2Z0) Canada. As a project for Education Week we are trying to meet new people through the sea. Where and when have you found this letter? Who are you?
Box 68 Saulnierville
Digby Conty Your new friend,
Timothy Comeau
————————————-
// La Semaine d”education was our favorite time of the year, since it was the week for projects such as these, and roadtrips. I always loved the road trips: the museums in the valley – Fort Anne, Port Royal; the government projects: the tidal power generation station in 1987, listening to Bon Jovi on the bus ride home. We were given a pen to write this letter with, a special pen with indellible ink. It was made to seem all fancy and expensive. Later, with the whole art thing, I recognized the pen as a simple drawing pen.The wine bottles were brought in by the teachers. They probably threw a party to get them all.
The bottles were taken out to sea by a father of one of my classmates. He brought them out beyond the tip of Nova Scotia and dumped them overboard. Two were found in Maine, I think, or at least one was. Another went to New Brunswick. In the year or two following we’d occasionally have a visitor at the school or a letter read from a person who’d found it. This letter arrived for me in 1988, by which time I was in junior high. My sister was at the elementary school and she brought it home. She said there’d been quite a commotion that day, when it arrived. At first I had trouble reading the letter, since the indenting seem exagerated and the ‘m’ looked like ‘n’ or ‘w’s or whatever.
…or the ones from England, Sweden, Canada, whatever. How many of these franchises are there? And what do they all mean?
I’ve said before in conversation that the Idol franchise is remarkable in that it proves that young people aren’t apathetic about voting – they don’t seem to mind voting with their cell phones for pop singers. Further, this willingness to co-opt democracy for cultural workers says something about how we don’t live in a Spartan (Greek/Athenian) or Philistine (Hebrew) culture. We live in one that cherishes a certain kind of art, rather than the lame foolishness of galleries.
I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes lately. And some of Aesychlus – I’ve never had that much interest before and remember ten years ago listening to some friends in uni talking about Oedipus Rex and I couldn’t believe anyone would want to read Greek plays nowadays – too old fashioned. But what one gets out of ancient Greek literature is a recognition of some constants of human nature, and a better understanding of the theatre and through this, the attractions of film and television.
But one notes that the playwrights were competing, that the theatre evolved out of a presentation or ritual and a festival. It seems that the same impulse that gave rise to the theatre in ancient Athens is the same that gives rise to American Idol. An audience, voting for the performers in their spectacle. The Greek playwrights told the stories of the city, commenting and alluding to things in a way that we see in sketch comedy shows today, especially something like Saturday Night Live. But SNL is known to be the result of a collective effort, and there’s no voting for the best skit or skit writer.
If the theatre expressed the beliefs of the Athenians, and held a mirror up to their city-state civilization, what does the Idol franchise express? That consumerism is a functional religion for an otherwise collective secular civilization. Because the Idol franchise operates in more than one country, it shows that our civilization is no longer confined to individual nation states, but is spread across a lingu franca English world which we usually call Western. We could just as easily call it the Idolic, given our love of idol worship (see John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards Chapter 11).
Our animated images function as gods, ghosts, angels … we have a whole pantheon of celebrity that goes back to this Greek heritage. This Idolic civilization claims to be secular, but is so in practice only, because each nation state has a population of believers within it. It also seems clear that the human being must take a position on a matter of belief: either they’re for a spiritual life, or their not; either they believe in some god, or they don’t; but that’s to say that spirit cannot be a vacuum: something will rush into to fill that void.
Our secular society, which in uncomfortable with open displays of belief, encourages everyone to be in the closet about these matters and functionally consumerist in public. This is what most often fills in that void. But it’s also not that simple … as I write I’m thinking of teenage girls in sneakers and lip gloss, caught up in that superficial world, and asking where does an idea of god fit into that? It’s another aspect of our Idolic civilization: everything is image, everything is mediated by the potential presence of the camera, to look hot is to praise whatever. Is sex our secular god? We all want to look hot to play with the image of sex?
Too often we use the word consumerism, implying that buying stuff is what we want. It seems that we all want style, beauty, cool, attractiveness … things that live up to a religion of image rather than belief. As I write this I’m also trying to figure in the stupid people who gossip about the love lives of their friends at work, who invest in Disney DVDs, whose entire lives seem cliché ridden and empty of what we could call culture in an elitist way. Not that these are bad people, and it seems a given that they’ll always exist, but they’re boring and distasteful. They’re probably quick to identify as Christians as well, so they’re caught between two belief systems: the one they live, and they one they think they live: that is, what they’d tell you despite the evidence. Such a disparity is a sign of unconsciousness, and perhaps that accounts for their appearance of stupidity and the dullness of their conversation. They’re really quite asleep. Or watching the flickering shadows of the television.
The Idol music festival is not designed to praise Dionysus or one particular pantheonic god (accept for maybe Simon Cowell) but is instead designed to generate a market for a forthcoming CD by the winner chosen by the cell-phone voting audience. It’s brilliant marketing, and has unfortunately been copied by everyone. But the willingness to adopt this method to sell speaks of what we consider to be important: living up to an image we come to know through marketing.
And that, my friends, is mostly it for the 1986 diary entries. There is something in April to look forward to, and after this point twenty years ago, I didn’t write anything in the diary again until September.
I love how the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art is honoring American art stars. Last November it was Vito Acconci; this April it’s Carolee Schneemann. Be good little provincial rubes and get your tickets now.
The house is ours!1 That’s a nice house I tell ya!
_______________________ 1. I remember him with the rumpled look of the time which has been captured in some photos. The thick beard. The lumberjack clothes. He comes in the door and says its ours and my sister and I rush to hug him. We were excited about moving for all the usual reasons. The calendar tells me it was a Tuesday; we’d come home from school, and he’d been out negotiating. Worked out the deal, got the papers signed or whatever. Twenty years later he makes a show of the slowness of the corn syrup, saying it’s like molasses in January, although we have central heating now and he never eats molasses anyway. Time has shaved off the beard and etched gray into the air, and taken away a healthy plumpness which never turned obese and which I think I’ve inherited. He fills the coffee mug with the ice cream, a chore since the block is frozen hard. Then the patience of the thick corn syrup, which he’s always enjoyed with ice-cream.
We went to check out a house. Well, I think we might move.1
_________________ 1.On 1986: When I later went to artschool and was taught about Modernism I never thought I would one day apply to that idea to my life, but I see it now quite clearly as an apt was of summing up 1986. For, in my mind, there is striation of a pre-1986 world, and the post-1986 world, and for years, the post 1986 world was the Modern one. The world of now, the present, the near yesterday. Of course, this is now 20 years later, and I can look back as to why 1986 had a different flavour and immediacy because of the way this day shaped by experience.
We went to check out a house. The folks had been looking to move for a while so we’d been to other houses. I vividly remember the dandelions in Comeauville the day we went to see the house with a turret. That must have been the previous May. On this day, as we walked in the front door, I can still see the boys in the field across the street playing around their little salvaged-plywood fort. We toured the house and went home, and I don’t really remember much about that – the boys in the field is what has stayed with me clearly.
Twenty years later, I was told, I’d be sitting in a dentist’s chair, with a mask over my nose, breathing laughing gas. Twenty years from now, it’ll be a Thursday, whispered, and this is what you’ll see. Pink and yellow and blue. Their faces over you. Reminded of those silly scenes in movies where doctors look down over the camera. The pinch and the flash as the teeth are removed. I didn’t feel a thing. This isn’t a big deal. Wow. Did you get it all out? All of it? All of it, she answers. She’s very pretty, and you keep thinking that’s half the sedation right there – to have such a pretty girl to look at during the procedure. Later the freezing wears off and you’re two teeth short of a full set, but have gone through the initiation rite of our culture, to have some wisdom teeth sacrificed to the gods of good dentistry. The coincidence is a little staggering actually, isn’t it: you sacrifice your wisdom teeth to become a full adult in this culture of stupidity. Or maybe I’m just being cynical. Of course, what does recuperation consists of? Channel surfing. Too distracted by the wounds to try reading, you listen to CBC3 podcasts with the TV on mute, and go round and round and round. Like Sampson’s haircut, your dental procedure has made you vulnerable to celebrity gossip and marketing campaigns.
But twenty years before, it was the prospect of moving, which opened a new chapter into your life.
Well, it’s the last week of bowling. Next week’s a banquet.1
_____________ 1. I bowled on Saturdays and found it boring. Or maybe that was the following year … anyway, the banquet was something to look forward to. Little more than a potluck, it to, if I remember correctly, was boring.
R’s1 party was the pits. The car almost didn’t start to go to that garbage.
_____________
1. As I recall, the car almost didn’t start because of the cold. R was my best friend through gradeschool, although it seems to me that our friendship would come to a close within the year, if I remember correctly. This party was a sleepover, and I recall being in the top bunk and freaked out by the general weirdness of the thing. R’s brother was a bully who I think spent time in reform school … and then these girls showed up who were intimating sexuality in ways that I wasn’t ready for which freaked me out even more. I got mad at them and told them I wasn’t ready to have sex, although I was probably overreacting, since they were trying to seduce us or anything – they were maybe 13 or 14 themselves, but needless to say, the atmosphere wasn’t one were I felt comfortable. Hence, ‘the party was the pits’.
My parents got home from concert. Been coksing to go to Yarmouth demain.1
______________ 1. Revisiting these entries twenty years later brings back at times a surprising detail of memory, while other times reminding me of things forgotten, while also recording things for which I have no memory. For example, in the past couple of days, I’d forgotten why my grandmother came to take care of us, and yet today I see it was because my parents had gone to a concert in Halifax. They’d parked the car and saw some pop star … I don’t remember who, and no point in asking them since there’s no way they’d remember anyway. What I do remember is being told that someone had broken into all the cars parked along side the road, except for theirs. But, that story may refer to another concert they went to at another time.
What I don’t remember is using the term ‘coksing’ at this age, which I find remarkable. When I first typed up these entries some time ago, I thought it might be a typo, until realizing that it was an expression that had somehow filtered into Clare from the metropoles. It was the mid-80s and cocaine, I am now told, was everywhere, to the point that 11 year olds were prone to say they were coksing to go town the next day.
Saturday March 15 1975He decided he liked sitting in his chair for a while each day on March 15 1975.
I think this must be a prelude to what I’ve come to enjoy as an adult: beginning the day with a cup of coffee, sitting at the table, looking outside, or otherwise quietly composing my thoughts. At the point this was writen I was a month and half old.
Eleven years later, I wrote this in my first attempt at keeping a diary:
Saturday 15 March 1986You know, I was trying to break world records today. Very good like all my Saturdays are.
I don’t remember what world records I was trying to break. Possibly something involving jumping. One shouldn’t picture anything worthy of note, but rather something foolish, pathetic and yet charming due to it coming from an 11 year old’s jouissance.
Ten years after that – and ten years ago – on 15 March 1996, I wrote:
Friday 15 March 1996. I slept in accidentally, and missed Applied Ant.1 I went to linguistics, but was late. E2 and I went to the communications lab. After, I told D3 that I needed a transcription, she said come back around 2:30. So, from 1.30 to 2 I talked with M4 on the 5th, they then had to go, so I waited around for D, who bothered me by standing too close and invading my personal space. Then I went home, and hanged out with S5, did my laundry, and talked with W6 who came for K7, who wasn’t home yet. After [they] took off I killed time until 5:40 when I went to see J8 at work. We talked, and I took off around 7, and she told me she might see me later at the Seahorse, where I went around 10:30, because I was supposed to meet Ba9 and Br10 there. I saw none of them, so I left at ten to twelve after two draught and went home and worked on my journal entry.
This alphabet of first initials consists of these letters:E, D, M, S, W, K, J, B & B. I plugged those into an anagram generator and they gave me a list of words including: bed, webs, desk, skew, sew, jew, and bmw. Nevertheless, I’ve been reduced to this alphabet perhaps due to the mistaken notion that I’m protecting the identities of those involved. Note 1: Applied Anthropology class, which I was studying at Saint Marys. Note 2: a classmate with whom I was doing a project (I think). Note 3: My professor, who a friend of mine (now a lawyer) thought was a milf, although we didn’t have that term at the time to describe her that way. Note 4: M, a girl on the 5th floor of the residence. S, the subject of Note 5, was one of my roommates, and the other roommate was Note 7, Mr. K. Mr. W, Note 6, I don’t remember. J, Note 8, was a girl I was quite fond of, which is a bit of understatement considering I was all in love with her. Love at first sight is both embarrassing and real. She was mean to me and became a lesbian and if I saw her again today, I’d fully expect her to continue being mean to me, her bitchiness both a part of her nature and one of the reasons I was attracted to her in the first place. Or perhaps she’s nice now, in which case it’d be nice to drink wine with her and catch up. Notes 9 and 10: the B-boys: friends from when we lived in the same residence.
Eight years later, on Mon. 15 March 2004 I sat where I’m sitting now, and using the same computer I’m using now, I bought my webspace, having acquired the goodreads.ca domain name the week before.
Well I tell you every test I’m getting this week is nearly all F’s.1. Bad you Tim, bad boy.
_______________ 1. I remember this was because of the commotion surrounding my grandfather’s death, when homework and studying was the least of my concerns.
video art: In the late 20th Century, art had become so vague a concept that it was colonized by a variety of practices which otherwise had their own industries. Movie makers called themselves video artists. Actors called themselves performance artists. Set designers called themselves installation artists. A language centering on ‘exploration’ developed, so that there were two generations of people trying to figure out what one could do with a technology besides what it was designed for. Was a TV merely for watching tv shows? Was a video camera merely used to record the type of boring stuff one saw in TV shows? These were the types of questions being asked, so that by the time computers and digital video cameras become widely available to the mainstream, the artists had already been trying for 30 years to figure out what more one could do with it, resulting in much work that is no more watchable and comparable to great art than a scientist’s lab-notebook is comparable to great literature. It wasn’t until the capacity for unintentional masterpieces brought about by the computer and the na??ve mainstream video editor that one could begin to talk about a genuine video art. An example in addition to just about anything on Viral Video
Coincidences: a pattern of perception which lends itself to superstition, although if one refuses to indulge in superstition, can find some amusement from them. Examples include:Bush and Quail: quails are birds that hide in bushes. An American president named Bush picked as his vice-president a man named Quayle. This president’s son, also named Bush, picked a vice-president who accidentally shot his friend while hunting quail.
Ford and the Presidents: President Lincoln was assassinated in the Ford’s Theatre in 1865. In the early 20th Century, Henry Ford made the horseless carriage affordable which revolutionized American society and created an eponymous brand, so that by 1963, President Kennedy could be assassinated while riding in a Ford Lincoln convertible.
Good day. Had lobster for super. Airwolf was good. Cob’s1 was good to.
________________ 1. I was quite a fan of Airwolf. Twenty years later, I find myself watching Battlestar Galactica on Saturday nights. I remember Cob’s to have been a television show, but I’ve been unable to find anything on it through Google, which probably means that I spelled the show’s name wrong, or that it wasn’t actually called Cob’s.
Left school early. I cried at the funeral. Went in a limo! Went to bed at 12:00.1
___________________
1. I was up late because of the wake, in which many people got drunk. My specific memory is being under the dinning room table and laughing hard at the stories being told by my grandfather’s old friend and one time neighbor, Dr. Felix, who’d also served as the family doctor to my aunts and uncles. I remember finding one story particularyly funny, and that one being the tale of my uncle’s hunting injury, when he’d been shot in the leg as a young man.
This was the first and last time I’d been in a limosine, driven to the funeral from the funeral home with my parents. The funeral itself was a strange affair – the church was packed (as my grandfather had been prominent) and there’d been more than one priest presiding, one of whom was a large man with a loud voice, and more than one person said, ‘he didn’t need a microphone’. When my other grandfather died in 1993, that funeral was a even stranger affair, as we all sat in a room off to the side of the usual … the pews reserved for people who weren’t members of the family, sequestered as we were. I’d have to turn my head to see the orations, look through the partitions in the wall. However, at this point, 7 years earlier, I sat in the pews next to my relatives in the Catholic church, and at the end, when they were wheeling the casket out and down the aisle, I let myself cry as the full weight of ‘I’ll never see him again’ hit me.
Same as Feb 24. Went to home. It snowed all day. He looks so good in that coffin.1
_________________ 1. I can see that I wrote this after the fact, filling in the events of Monday and Tuesday in the past tense. Thus, ‘same as Feb 24’ – we went to Weymouth, we went to the funeral home, my father taught me that relatives might want to shake my hand and say ‘mes sympathie’. I forget if he taught me what, if any, my response should be. The day before, the discussion around the kitchen table, my uncle talking about how my Grandfather had a loathing for funerals three days after a death, and how this was nonetheless what was going to take place.
At the funeral home that evening, it was kind of boring, kind of strange. My dead grandfather in the open casket to my left as I sat there and watched all the old people come to pay their respects. All very solemn and weird in the way that life’s rituals are weird when you’re a kid and you don’t quite get it. Around this time there was a drive with my Mom, I sitting in the passenger seat ‘up front’ and she saying the usual, ‘you can be happy he’s in a better place’ and perhaps this was the time, because we were talking about death, that I told her that sometimes I’m so curious about Heaven I can’t wait to get there, which she found a little alarming, of course. Now I have no interest in any of it whatsoever.
A year ago, I had this diary out and my sister found it and read some of it, finding it funny. At dinner that night my mother read from it and this day’s entry in particular made her laugh: ‘he looks so good in that coffin’. What I remember is looking at the still face of my grandfather, the mystery of death, and lightly touching his face to experience it in some way. But then I felt weird, because death=germs and all that, and I had a spell as a germophobe at around this time, during the mid-80s, so afterward, at my grandmother’s, I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d touched my grandfather and felt gross, because it felt shameful, and I washed my hands more than once. What I do remember was the coolness, and that lingering feeling of uncleanliness, and how I should have a more respectful feeling for my dead grandpa than simply feeling he was now gross.
Good and bad. Pretty good at beginning and bad at end. Grandpa died today.1
_________________
1. Some notes:
The Buddha was born in 2777 (according to my standardized chronology) and was 12 years old when Confucius was born in 2789. Confucius, it is said, ‘enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.’ (Wikipedia). This would have been in the 2790s. The Buddha left home to go on his journey of Enlightenment in 2806 at age 29, two years after Confucius began studying in 2804, as it is said, ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning’. The Buddha attained Enlightenment in 2812 at age 35, and Confucius tells us that in the year 2819 he took his stand. The Buddha died in 2857 at 80 and two years later, Confucius writes, ‘At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.’ Two years after that, in 2861 he died at age 72. Or perhaps he died at 71, before reaching his birthday that year.
Two-thousand four hundred and sixty five years later, in 5326, (otherwise known as 1986) my grandfather died at age 71, a man whose name is unknown to history, another blip in that great span of time between those ancients and ourselves. He is memory to me now, more legend than human to my cousins born after him, one of whom will be twenty this year. My grandfather was born to a lumberjack and housewife a few weeks into the events we now call World War I. At 31, (my present age) he saw my father for the first time, a baby born two weeks after Easter and two weeks before Hitler would shoot himself in a Berlin basement. Thirty years after that, I would be born, and now I’m at the age when I should be (according to this pattern) producing the fellow whose child will remember me twenty years after my death. If I were to die at my grandfather’s age, that would put this grandchild’s memory in the year 2066. But this pattern appears to be broken, since there’s no chance I’ll be having children anytime soon, and perhaps this also means I have more than 40 years left to live.
My father was in Moncton, my mother called him to tell him the news. I’d been playing with my Lego boat, my sister near me. She recieved the phone call and sat on the couch in the living room, and when she hung up told us that he’d passed away. My sister, crouching to my right, sprang up and ran to my mother and begain sobbing. I had a quiet and stunned reaction, yet joined the hug happening on the couch. The phone call to my father, away in some motel, and so to this day I don’t know how he reacted to the news his father had died. It’s also something I don’t feel it’s any of my business to find out.
It was a bit of surprise, since the week previous he’d been on the mend. The previous Thursday, when I went to the doctor’s regarding my pencil-wound, my mother and he had talked about how he’d been getting better, because the doctor was in fact my uncle. And yet fate intervened on this weekend in February, and a lifetime of smoking and drinking had worn out a body not destined to live to the Canadian life-expectancy of the time, which was 75. That’s what I remember thinking, as I’d recently learned about those statistics – that he’d died three years short of when ‘he was supposed to’, and yet that three year measure would only have been acurate had he made it to his next birthday that September. Had he made it to that birthday, he would have met his latest Grandchild born that August, a boy, a cousin to myself, the first son of my uncle, the third of my grandfather’s sons. At the news of my cousin’s birth I was happy since the responsibility of carrying on the family line no longer rested solely with me.
Fun day! A and S came. Had snowfall fight and played with computer.1
_____________ 1. A was my sister’s best friend, but S I don’t remember at all. Apparantly it snowed twenty years ago today, and the computer refered to was a Commodore 64, which I still have in the basement, and it still works to. I set it all up last in 2002 because I was working on a project that used it.
Good day. School strike began. Had to wait a half hour at doc’s1.
____________ 1. I went to the doctor’s with regard to my pencil wound. He said it was no big deal. By this time it was already dark with mark of the lead, he said it might stay that way, or something to that effect. He may of used hydrogen peroxide on it, but I don’t really remember. At age 11, a half-hour seemed like a long time.
Last month, I waited 45 minutes for my dentist appointment, watching Paul Martin give one of his pathetic campaign speeches. When I got home, I casually noticed the note I’d made on the calendar, which read ‘11.30’, and here I’d thought it’d been for 11. ‘That’s why I waited so long!’ I said to myself.
Good and bad. Michelle jammed a pencil in my arm.1 Just math for homework. Had fun playing with “Missile Man”.
_________________ 1. Michelle, my sister, was doing her math homework on the floor in the living room. I was bugging her and she got so angry with me she stabbed me in my left arm with her pencil. Well, she was trying to hit me and forgot she was holding a pencil, I guess we could say. It didn’t hurt so much but it was kind of shocking to see the pencil hanging from this wound, it’s lead tip embedded beneath the skin. She got into a world of trouble which I appreciated, since it was usually I who was in trouble.
To this day, I have a mark there, a little gray spot. It’s the only type of tattoo I ever received.
Made Lego boat. Named it “Missile Man” Had miny lauchment. We thought Grandpa might die that night.1 Made a spare on Bowling.2
_____________________ 1.I built this boat out of Lego, wrote ‘Missile Man’ on a peice of paper, which I taped to it’s bow. I playfully held a launch with some lego bottle or something. I remember playing with this while Airwolf was on tv. During the time my mother got a phone call; one of the relatives in Kentville calling in with a report on my ill Grandfather’s condition.
2. I used to bowl on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t enjoy it too much, as waiting around for my turn I found boring.
1st Week of February:
Islam, a religion as iconoclastic as early Judaism (golden calf) says: no pictures. Thus, representing the prophet is enough to inspire protests with regard to mediocre cartoons published four months ago.
2nd Week of February:
1. Photographs from Abu Ghriab, published two years ago, inspire outrage within the United States and the rest of the world. More photos from time of the first batch have been leaked to an Australian newspaper, likely to inspire more outrage. At the same time, a scandal brews in England due to the video (animated images) of soldiers beating Iraqis three years ago.
2. The actor in (what I consider to be offensive) ads for Alexander Keith’s is arrested for owning kiddie porn. Thus, he’s in legal trouble over our culture’s verboten images. Labatt’s, which owns Keith’s, announces they are pulling the ads, because they have suddenly been recontextualized in a way that makes them offensive … the taboo aura surrounding the kiddie porn pictures now influence the animated image of the actor stereotyping the Scottish as beligerent.
In John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards the chapter ‘Life in a Box – Specialization and the Individual’ concerns itself with our Modern Selves, and he writes:
While our mythology suggests that society is like a tree with the ripening fruits of professional individualism growing think upon it, a more accurate image would show a maze of corridors, blocked by endless locked doors, each one leading in or out of a small cell. (p. 507)
This image has thoroughly permeated my conscious understanding of this civilization, so much so that I saw it reflected at work and brought it up in the essay I submitted to a magazine recently. Two weekends ago while channel surfing, I stopped when I saw a maze on the screen – the overhead shot from The Shining of the garden maze.
In a flash I saw that movie as a metaphor for our civilization. There’s the maze mentioned by Saul, and there’s the Hotel, shining psychic energy on the humans. The Hotel represents History, a looming structure, a legacy, built on the graves of people forgotten and ignored. The Hotel shines violence into the mind of The Man, who goes on a rampage and attacks women and children. Our civilization then is made up of violent minded men who excuse their actions by blaming History, saying, ‘its human nature’ or ‘its their fault because of something they did years ago (i.e. ‘Saddam gassed his people)’. The Buddhists would see a good example of Karma. Your actions past and present wear a new pattern into your life, so that it becomes your future action. And in The Shining, Nicholson is told he was always the caretaker, the photo at the end suggesting a karmic rebirth.
On February 8th’s The Colbert Report Alan Dershowitz suggested that we need to license cartoonists and comics, which I find reprehensible, but not that surprising coming from this apologist for American Empire. It’s clear enough that Dershowitz’s ethical compass has lost its magnetism. He was talking about these stupid cartoon protests. Dershowitz’s offensive comment was followed in turn for a commercial: ‘own the best horror movie of 2005; Saw II’.
Why would you want to? But of course, this all makes sense given how violent our society is: Dershowitz saying we need to license comics, he who has advocated the use of torture ‘in extreme situations’ and goes on to argue the neo-con idea that the war on terrorism will never end – that we’re living in the la-la-land of danger and violence and so no more trips to the candy store, no more right to say offensive things, no more release by making fun of assholes like him. And after this rosy vision of our civilization, where we’ve come after hundreds of years of trying to make life a good thing for all, and being told that we defeated Hitler so that we can all live in freedom and happiness, we can enjoy the freedom to purchase two-hours of fictionalized trauma to enjoy with our significant others, or worse yet, all by ourselves.
And yet, there is The Shining made 26 years ago, to show us our society. Our society where violence is causal while condemned with shallow words. Yet somehow our culture manages to create individuals like Gil Fronsdal (a Buddhist teacher) and John Ralston Saul; individuals not seemingly integrated into the violent aspects of our (North American) society. For that matter, there are people like Richard Simmons.
Somehow our culture manages to create criticism which tries to keep these forces of violence and madness in check. People like Dershowitz obviously don’t see the advantage of this. Licensed cartoonists would not be allowed to express the wildness of human imagination, nor would they be allowed to be critical. We need the outlet in our society to be offensive – it’s what’s keeps us from burning down embassies, and which strengthens our minds so that what we find offensive doesn’t inspire violence despite all the cultural signals which imply that is exactly what we should do.
Valentines! Had fun at party. Movie was great!1 Didn’t see it all of it.2 I think I told D3 off.
_______________________ 1.The movie (as previously mentioned) was The Never Ending Story which we watched on video as part of our Valentine’s day ‘party’ which meant time off of class and probably some sweets. I recall that The Never Ending Story excited both my imagination and touched me emotionally. At the time I had a total crush on the Princess, who I learned via Google is named Tami Stronach and is now a dancer in New York City. Now I look at her image from the time and see nothing more than a child, who was 2 years older than I was, and I find it strange to think I once imagined love based on this kid.
2. School ended before the movie did. We watched the rest at a later date.
3. D was the older brother of one of my classmates, who used to bully me. ‘Telling him off’ only meant that I stood up to him.
Last week saw a lot of coverage in mainstream media about the protests over some stupid drawings. In the Saturday (11 Feb) Globe and Mail, the editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon argued that they weren’t showing them because they didn’t feel they added anything important to the story, while justifying the occasional photo of bombed bodies on Israeli buses. (In that case I’m thinking of a 2003 front page). He wrote:
‘As one cartoonist said earlier this week, this is not a matter of self-censorship. It is a question of editing. Every day we are faced with similar decisions, particularly in choosing photos. Do we show a naked woman? Do we show a dead baby? Do we show bodies blown apart by a suicide bomber or other samples of the carnage that come our way regularly? Most often the answer is we do not. Only when we feel an offensive photo is absolutely necessary to the understanding of the story do we loosen our restraints.’
This point makes no sense, given that a full understanding of protests about drawings should require that one see them for oneself. I could take the mainstream media’s self-righteousness seriously if this were not the age of the internet and Google. You want to see ’em, go ahead and see them. The same goes for pictures of naked women (naked men aren’t offensive?) dead babies, and carnage (orgish.com?). The media has used arguments of self-censorship and editing to draw us a picture of their own obsolesce.I’ve been wondering about how many people have actually seen the images on the net. As that’s part of what Goodreads is about, I almost sent the link a week ago but on the other hand, I didn’t want to be part of the game of offending people. I’ve been wishing this story would just go away like they always do. Remember two years ago when Mel Gibson was supposedly an anti-semite?
Yet I can relate to being offended by images. In 2002 John Paul II came to Toronto for the World Youth Day and I went and saw him give Mass, since I grew up a Catholic and had seen his photograph at my grandmother’s house for as long as I could remember, in addition to it being very popular in the area. There was a feeling of obligation, mixed with nostalgia I suppose. The night before the Mass, I went to an opening at Art System, the Ontario College of Art and Design student run gallery. Their show was about the Pope, and extended to Catholicism in general. As you can imagine, there were plenty of images of priests and popes sodomizing young boys. For one of the few times in my life, I was offended, but I knew where it was coming from (the rebellious young influenced by the scandals in the news) and having grown up in an open and tolerant society, felt no need to staple a placard to a stick and lead a protest, considering it was all just stupid and immature.
Now, one of the arguments with these Muhammed cartoons is that the editors of the newspaper should have known better. These Muslims are rioting and protesting because they feel insulted. I find it all kind of crazy that some people can get all upset over drawings, but as a visual artist I suppose I’m supposed to get all excited by the power of the medium and jump on the iconographic bandwagon, or get on the side of the cartoonists and talk about freedom of expression and denounce this iconoclasm. But I feel I have better things to do. The World has better things to do.
The editors of newspapers in North America would know better than to publish the images I saw from OCAD. They would be able to see how unfair they were. I’m not sure if that’s censorship, as much as it’s a respect for context. I can well imagine the images published elsewhere – in a show catalogue, in some article critiquing or analyzing the Church’s pederast scandals, in some art history book. The show didn’t warrant getting shut down by the cops, which still happens sometimes. There were no protests.
In this case, the cartoons violate Islam’s prohibition against images, and especially the prohibition in depicting the Prophet. Worse, the arguments made against the images by Muslim spokespeople are that they stereotype Muslims as terrorists. The image by Claus Seidel seems aimed to offend by merely representing Muhammed, whereas the image by Erik Sorensen seems to be as juvenile and ignorant as the shit I saw that night at OCAD.
Further, I have a recent example of being offended by an image. And the image in question is that of an ad featuring Ann Coulter and Robert Novak, featured prominently next to the cartoons here. This webpage thus manages to offend not only Muslims, but secular liberals. And, when I ask myself, ‘why do they keep protesting?’ I’m reminded by Coulter, who recently referred to them as ‘ragheads’.
The best explanation for what’s happened over the past week (advanced by Rick Salutin and reported by Simon Tudiver in Maisonneuve’s Mediascout) is that Muslims are pissed off for always being stereotyped and caricatured as terrorists, from these stupid cartoons to Hollywood’s blockbusters. Tudivier’s headline, by the way, ‘Protesting the cartoon professor’ refers to Peter March, who posted the images on the door of his office at Saint Mary’s University. Peter March was a professor of mine in 1998. After Tudivier raises the Salutin article, he adds, ‘Had Professor March offered up such an idea, MediaScout would have applauded his contribution. We should be looking to our academics to elevate the debate, not debase it by merely inciting an angry mob.’ What’s unclear in the reportage about Prof. March was that he teaches philosophy, and I think it’s fair to suggest that, instead of merely trying to incite an angry mob (as he waded into a protest on campus last week), he was trying to engage in Socratic debate.
Which should help remind us that all of these easy explanations cheapen us all, and I’m going to go back to wishing the world had something better to talk about (like poverty, aids, hunger, global warming, etc). The way the religious keep hijacking the agenda of human betterment seems to me the best advertisement for agnostic secularism, which is why I’m rather happy to live in a Canada, where that’s pretty much the way it is, although we end watching the world’s news for entertainment rather than dealing with our own social agenda. A week ago I wanted to send out the link to the Colbert Report video below, under the headline, ‘why I’m glad I’m not American’ but truth be told, inasmuch as it critiques the American economy, it’s true here as well. This type of thing warrants a lot more discussion than drawings, or ‘turncoat politicians’. – Timothy
Went to R’s on bus. Sliding again. Triple fun. L1 was there. You know something, she is real dumb, dumb, dumb.
_________________________
1.L was a girl in my sister’s class who lived near the hill that we were sledding on. The ‘dumb dumb dumb’ comment referred to her statement about a plane – one was flying overhead and we could hear it, and I looked for it, and she said, ‘it’s in the sky!’ I was too young to know the expression, ‘no shit…’ and so was amazed by her general thick headedness. I look back now and think I was probably being unfair and too mean.
D. D. came over.1 Went sliding.2 Jumping on pond.3 Had tiny play.4 She slept over.
______________________ 1. D.D. was my sister’s friend.
2. Or sledding … our house at the time was built at the top of a gentle slope. During the day we slid into the brambles of the bushes. Later that evening, my Dad told me he’d been watching us and was glad to see that I instinctually covered my head with my arms. Why this was worth telling me I’m not sure.
3. We had a pond in the backyard which was frozen over. There were other times when we played a pathetic version of hockey on it, and times when I fell through the ice.
4. I remember nothing about this experiment in juvenile theatre.
Gunshow. Janitor was weird1. Played with Greg and Joey2. Went to store. Cashier said, ‘Cuse Me’.3 Went out for supper. Joey told funny stories.4
________________________ 1. I don’t recall exactly what was weird about the janitor, except that maybe he was annoyed to have all these people in the gym and kids like myself and the others playing Transformers on the steps when he needed to mop. But I’m bringing an adult understanding to the situation now. Or maybe he was retarded … that would have been something I’d have noted down, if it was a question of mental oddness. Take for example, note 3, where I write the cashier said ‘cuse me’.
2. Greg and Joey were two other kids who my sister and I would hang out with at gunshows. The odd thing about growing up this way was that we had friends in other parts of the province who we’d see every few months during these weekends. Greg was from Bible Hill, which is near Truro. Joey was from Syndey. Joey was the funniest person I knew, and he always taught me what the cool cartoons were that I should be watching. For example, because of him I started paying more attention to G.I. Joe and ninjas. I recall now that there was a ninja craze in the 1980s which I’d completely forgotten about.
3. We went to a corner store near the school where the gun show was being held. The situation was that the cashier was a little frazzled to have 5 near-ten-year-olds in her store, and as I recall the ‘cuse me’ came after one of us had paid or something, but she was all nervous thinking we were shop-lifting. In her accent, her ‘excuse me’ was heard as ‘kuse me’ (which is how I’d write it today). We all thought this was immensely funny and talked about it on the way back to the school, walking along the Dartmouth sidewalks bordered with snow.
4. As I said, Joey was the funniest kid I knew. On Sundays, after the show was over and the car was re-packed, we’d find some restaurant near the highway. I remember St. Huberts in this context, although I’m not sure if it was this particular weekend or another one. The kids would sit at their own table, where we would be entertained by Joey.
In the remarkable chapter Images of Immortality found within John Ralston Saul’s 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards he says this while tracing the development of artist heroes:
When Romanticism began to flourish in the late 18th Century and the ego began to grow until it dominated public life, people abruptly found Raphael far too modest a fellow to have been the father of the perfect image. So they tended to fall into line with the description of the technical breakthroughs which had been provided by Vasari in his Lives of the Painters, written shortly after the actual events. In other words, they transferred the credit to an irresponsible, antisocial individualist, Michelangelo – a veritable caricature of the artist in the 20th Century. If we were ever able to create a reasonable, open society, Leonardo would no doubt cease appearing to us as an overwhelming, almost forbidding, giant and the credit would be switched to him.
Since that time, Marcel Duchamp (analytical, reasonable) has overtaken Picasso (irresponsible, antisocial individualist that he was) as the greatest artist of the 20th Century, and Leonardo has inspired one of the most read books in the history of the world. Although there is a ton of political evidence to the contrary, perhaps we are witnessing the transition toward a reasonable open society after all? Slowly the balance is shifting so that the President of the United States says ‘Americans are addicted to oil’ and these five words become a headline (as it did yesterday on the Drudgereport), representing as they do a significant shift toward reality from a man famously blinded by ideology.
This Leonardo angle comes by way of the Martin Kemp interview link herein, in which he also complains about art writing. After they talk about his Leonardo book, they get to talking about contemporary art, and Kemp says the following:
AFH: What do you think of all the writing generated by the art world?
MK: There is a lot of writing generated that is redundant. When I was a graduate student, I used to review exhibitions and I found that sitting on the train heading in to London to see the show, I would be writing the review before I arrived. At one point when I was working in Glasgow, I did a review for the Guardian of a nonexistent exhibition, which consisted of all the popular words and apparatus. It was a critical account that stood independently and I then dropped in a spurious artist in to the framework. You see a lot of writing like that allows the machinery to go on by just dropping a name into the mix along the way.
AFH: Do you think this kind of writing is destructive to art or artists?
MK: One thing that has happened very dramatically is that artists in the educational system have to produce more written work as part of their degrees. That has had an effect on artists and artistic production. I think many artists are automatically thinking about how the work will be written about when they are making it. It is not necessarily that they plan, but they can’t stop doing it. That hyper-sensitivity to the written word and what artists need to say about their own work, knowing they will be interviewed, often goes alongside a very self-consciousness about how work will look in reproduction, how it will be discussed, how artists need to justify their own work in the media. The issue is how to corral the artists and the critics into one arena that represents the work well.
This leads me to post the Jerry Saltz article from the end of December, wherein he talks about being a critic. Personally my own experience with writing criticism slanted me toward thinking it wasn’t worth it. Better to let people make up their own minds about things. There’s a difference between criticism and publicity afterall, and no artist wants real criticism. Such genuine critique comes from someone like John Carey, where in the last link this is said about the art world: “Approved high art, Carey insists again and again, is too often simply a marker of class, education and wealth. ‘It assures you of your specialness. It inscribes you in the book of life, from which the nameless masses are excluded.’ Yet ‘the characteristics of popular or mass art that seem most objectionable to its high-art critics — violence, sensationalism, escapism, an obsession with romantic love — minister to human needs inherited from our remote ancestors over hundreds of thousands of years.'” It seems to me that in an increasingly open and reasonable society, professional artists would be derided for their unreasonable snobbish attitudes. But that’s just me.
Finally, a link to a Daily Show clip on Crooks and Liars. They offer two video feeds, one Windows and the other a Quicktime, but the quicktime one doesn’t work as a type this (maybe later?). The clip goes over the James Frey debacle, pointing out that while political lying is pooh-poohed, Oprah’s humiliation is that she ‘forced Americans to read, when they really didn’t have to’.
Went to Halifax!1 Why exclamation mark – fun. I went with $102. Got for birthday.2 Bought robot dog and Grimlock3. Went to Mother Tucker’s for supper.4
________________________ 1. As I mentioned the day before, we packed the car to go to the gunshow. As I said, my dad was a gunsmith … he sold guns out of the house. I later learned that the RCMP would tell him every once and a while they’d picked up some thugs who were planning to break in and steal them all, which must have been incredibly stressful. But part of the business involved travelling around the Maritimes to spend a weekend in some school’s gymnasium or a Legion hall, behind tables covered with old bed-spreads, with handguns laid out in rows and wired through the trigger guard. Fat men would examine them carefully.
I would wander around looking at the other displays, and usually found myself admiring the Nazi daggers, which prompted me to read some history. I learned of how the daggers were ceremonial rewards and based on an even older Teutonic design.That was actually one of the things I most appreciated about gunshows, was seeing these historical artifacts. The fact that perhaps they were being bought by skin-heads was over my head at the time. I always saw them as collectible for their part in making the story real. So there were Nazi armbands, the sawstika flag, all that shit. When, in 1999, I saw the movie American Beauty, I could understand the sinister aspect of the father owning a Nazi artifact, but I could also see how perhaps he was being misunderstood. The fact that he was a muderous homophobe was what made him evil, not that he owned this thing … what was it a plate or something?
The Halifax gun show was actually held in a school gym in Dartmouth. We always stayed at the motels in Bedford. Going to the malls, especially the Mic Mac Mall, was always the highlight of the trip.
2. I obviously hadn’t mastered the structure of a sentence yet. Yes, I recieved $102 for my birthday, which is $2 more than what I got this year.
3. The robot dog was the Tomy Spotbot. I found two today on eBay and almost completed the circle by bidding on the mint one. So that I could go back in time and tell myself that I’d be buying another one in exactly 20 years. I decided the circle shouldn’t be drawn. Nevertheless I set it to watch. The thing is, although I think this robot is around, somewhere in the basement, I’m not sure.And so, due to memory and a lifetime of consumerist training, I think it’s a reasonable expenditure to buy another one so that it can sit on my shelf. I have until Friday to convince myself either way, for or against buying it again. Probably against. No point really.
I thought the Grimlock was the robot arm I bought once on the Feb Gunshow trip with birthday money, but Google corrected my memory. It turns out Grimlock was the Tyranasaurus Rex Transformer.
4. On Saturday Nights during the gunshow weekend, my parents would get together with other sellers and we’d go out for a big supper. This night we went to Mother Tucker’s. During my time in Halifax going to university, I only went back there once, and that was 9 years later, for my 20th birthday, 31 Jan 1995. I was on a date with a girl whose name I no longer recall, who brought me there saying you eat free on your birthday. So that’s what I did. Then they sang Happy Birthday to me, which was embrassing. Then we went to see Before Sunrise at the Park Lane cinemas on Spring Garden Rd. While at Mother Tucker’s at age 20, I remembered being there before, but didn’t have this 1986 diary handy to give me the context of it being almost exactly nine years later. I remember it seeming to be a little run down by then, the decade having made it’s mark.
Happy Birthday! Mine. Nobody tried to spank me.1 Fun at night.2 Packed the car for gunshow. Next day.3
_______________________________ 1.Getting spanked on your birthday was the tradition where I grew up, in addition to having butter put on your nose.
2. I don’t remember any of this actually. Oddly enough what I didn’t write down was seeing the space shuttle explode on television, blossoming into a cloud. This I remember most clearly, and when I heard grown-ups talking of the Kennedy assassination and where they were, at this point I could relate. I was in class, Grade 5, I sat in the third row from the right when facing the teacher. She walked in to say that the Principal’s secretary had just told her there’d been an explosion with the space shuttle. It had already been in the news due to the Christina McCaulif/teacher angle. (Note to memoralists: nothing better than public disaster to seer a name in memory). I imagined something similar to what was depicted eleven years later in the 1997 movie Contact, and at this time eleven years earlier I was about ready to be emerge from the caul. At this midpoint between two stretches of 11 years, I sat at my school desk with a vision of an explosion’s aftermath in my mind, my imagination already well trained by Hollywood movies: it had occurred within the Shuttle, which remained docked at the tower. The crew slumped in their seats overcome by shockwave and toxic gas. But back to math lessons or French grammar or whatever it was. Obviously there was a school bus ride home at the usual time. I got home, the disaster was on the television, my parents had the excitability one would expect on such a day. I took my seat at the drafting table, which my parents had bought for some unknown reason and completely unrelated to my developing talent. I worked on my drawing story, with the scenes to my right. I even molded a space shuttle out of playdoh and squished it into nothingness as I re-enacted the destruction I was seeing over and over again. It seems to me that there was a little bit of disappointment that it wasn’t more spectacular, after all those Hollywood movies…just this big cloud…you couldn’t see anything really.
I worked on my drawing story. As I recall it was about God and the Devil and the creation of life on Earth. I think it must have been around this time that I’d created characters out of the letters of the Alphabet. Gave the letter ‘A’ eyes in the triangle part, some arms, the legs obvious. My teachers and classmates had found this clever and noteworthy. What I remember most clearly, and have associated with this day was working on the drawing and having a comet come flying low over the Earth, pieces of it falling off and springing into Life. During the 90s this became a popular theory, and I remembered this and thought, ‘maybe I was onto something there?’
The only reason I was inspired to use a comet in my story was because of all the hype Halley’s Comet was receiving, 1986 being the last year of it’s return. Later in the year I thought I saw it but I now realize I’d only seen a satellite.
I sat at the drafting table, thinking of my maternal grandparents who’d recently visited, and drew my pictures of Alpha God and Zeta Satan with the television replaying disaster and news-anchor commentary. In three days I would be 11.
3. My dad was a gunsmith and gunshows were part of his trade.
Went to party1. Danced with M2. Enjoyed it. Didn’t mind doing it anymore.
___________________________ 1. This was someone’s birthday party up the road from where I lived.
2. M was my girl next door, although she too lived up the road. We didn’t have neighborhoods like one does in a suburb or a city. We had roads. You have to drive everywhere. I could go to M’s house on the bicycle, or walk for ten minutes. But yes, my first dance. On a weeknight. Perhaps it was a snow day … I seem to recall having school off around this point. I certainly don’t remember going to school the next day.
The hug and the shuffle steps to bad 80s music. The budding of sexuality, and yet, like the trees of February, the bud was still undeveloped. M would turn into my first major crush, although even by this point I’d liked her since Grade 2. She was a girl that even the boys who later turned out to be gay fantasized about. My understanding is that she is now in Vancouver and is described as being ‘high maintenance’.
Throughout my adolescence, when I had this affection for her, she’d tell me I was ugly and made me feel unlovable, which gave me self-esteem issues into my early 20s. Those issues, or this fucked up emotional development, has in many ways damaged my relations with girls ever since, although I’d like to think that certain girls have helped me get past some of this baggage.
Occasionally I still dream of M, and am very curious as to how she turned out, what she’s like now in her early 30s. These dreams tend to reveal that deep down there’s a desire both for her approval, but also a desire to feel vindicated, to say, look what I became, so fuck you for all that teenage bullshit. Of course, by her standards, I still haven’t become much, and yet, twenty years later it has just become a story, and who cares if I ever see her again?
Went to see my Grandpere. He said this spring he???d teach me his tradition.1
_____________ 1. I sat in the same chair, at the same desk at my grandmother’s house this past summer. The kitchen table is still to the left, the books on the shelves above the desk the same ones that were there then. In so many ways my grandmother’s house is untouched by change and style, so that this memory intermeshes with so many others. I would sit at that desk (as I did last summer) and write, or read, or draw. I was sitting there twenty years ago today, and heard my grandfather say that he would teach me his tradition in the spring. He was going to teach me how to make a flute or something. He said he’d have to do it before he goes, or something to that effect, and he said this sitting at the kitchen table, speaking mostly to my grandmother, who was standing next to him. The scene: he was was sitting in his chair, to the right. She was standing to the left. She’s wearing a flower print shirt. After he said this, about doing it before he goes, she slaps him playfully, communicating, don’t say such things. We’re supposed to pretend to be immortal until we breath our last.
In the car, on the way home, I began to worry that he might die before he could show me this thing. His joke became my concern. I didn’t tell anyone, kept it to myself. Thought I was being silly. I’ve always had a streak of paranoia, and even then a part of me knew that I was letting my thoughts get away with themselves. I used to think the creaks of the house settling, especially coming from the ceiling, were the bullies at school who hated me so much they snuck into the house to crawl around the attic and drop down through the ceiling, on top of my bed, to plunge pocket knives into my heart. My imagination was not always friendly and fun, but a source of nightmares and anxiety. That’s how I remember the mid-80s. Fears of being murdered. And fears that perhaps I was psychic and my grandfather would die before spring.
I had my birthday party early. Lots of fun. Got games, comics, slingshot. Had a bon-fire.1
——————– 1. This bon-fire was held in the backyard. A Saturday night bon-fire in mid-January is one of life’s pleasures and I miss it now in my city dwelling days. The slingshot I remember the most fondly and I believe is now located in a box in the basement.
This follows from the previous entry of the 12th, in which I see I made the decision to have my birthday party early on the Sunday, that is, I must have thought to myself, ‘I’ll have it next weekend, on Saturday’. Of course, this thought fragment is a reconstruction, and I look back now to see the fire burning, the chill in the air, myself huddled and sitting on logs or some such thing. I was smaller then too, given I was about to turn 11. So the fire was probably bigger to my perspective then than it would be now. A medium sized fire for a small boy, who had no idea that in 20 years time he’d find himself typing words into a computer, sharing this memory with god knows who.
Why am I so cranky when it comes to the art-world? Well, for example, John Ralston Saul’s ‘Images of Immortality’ a chapter in his 1992 book, Voltaire’s Bastards, comes across as the perfect art history, an overview from whence we’ve come, and relevant to our technological lives. Yet I began art school four years after it was made available through publication, and have not read it until now.So I resent an art education which did not expose me to this when it should have. I resent the art world that ignores such resources, or blindly treats them as irrelevant because it was written in Toronto and not Paris. Simple answer.
The Current had a discussion this morning on political vision, and why there doesn’t seem to be any during this election campaign, or for that matter, ever. Which just reminds me that the current crop of politicians in Ottawa are old men without ideas. The Current played clips of what are usually considered political visionaries – Martin Luther King, Trudeau, Kennedy, who are all comfortably dead with faults forgotten. Nevertheless they are voices from the 1960s, an over-idealized time to ‘the grown ups’ of my generation, and a time that means little to someone like me who came into the world in the midst of disco. Means little, except for seeming like a dream time when politicians had the balls to do stuff, like send men to the moon, and not whine about how much it’d cost. The only thing for which money seems to not be an obstacle nowadays is for pissing on our rights. But I digress.
Let’s consider what our options are:
The Liberals: they could have given us a guaranteed income thirty years ago but that didn’t happen. They’ve been promising to decriminalize marijuana for that long as well, but again, pigs will fly first. They’ve been letting Sea King helicopters fall out of the sky since 1993, buying second-rate submarines that catch fire, and talking about a National Child Care program for just as long. They don’t do shit but preen and stammer before the cameras and try to hold on to power. My time as a Board member here and there has given me insight both on how inaction happens, and how easy it can be to be overwhelmed by plans and papers and etcs. Anyway, the Liberals could use a dose of decisiveness. (Of course, if they were decisive, some people would protest).
The Conservatives: the wolf has bought a suit of sheep’s clothing at Moores. Suddenly they’re ahead in the polls and it doesn’t seem that scary. Maybe because the Liberals come across as so pathetic and tired. Maybe as well I’m dazzled by the fact that a political leader is actually laying out an agenda.
The NDP: what the hell is wrong with this country that Layton and the NDP don’t have a huge lead? The only party that makes any sense on anything, the only party made up of people who come across as human beings and not imagination-less managers (Liberals) and simply cold-hearted, mean and stupid (Conservatives), you’d think the NDP could win an election or two. But instead they’re stuck at 15%, which is to say only 15% of the electorate are worth having a beer with. Geesh.
Green Party: What a joke. They can’t even get on the news.
Of course, to be fair to both the Greens and the NDP, the news, (that is ‘the media’) displays clear bias in framing the choice as that between the Conservatives and the Liberals. The NDP are always talked about as if they were the underdog, and the media refuses to take them seriously. They look at the poll numbers as if their 15% wasn’t in fact, their creation, which it is. That fifteen percent (I’m sure it’s fair to say) reflect the citizens of this country who read and who may or may not have a television set, and thus are informed by a plurality of sources and are comfortable thinking about things themselves, rather than be spoon-fed ideas by punditry.
As for the Greens, they can’t even get included on the televised debates … why? Is it the politicians or the TV producers that think we’re too stupid to follow that many talking heads?
They debates themselves are anything but a debate. Speechifying and posturing and practiced mannerisms and phony, cued-up smiles. A debate is what we see the talk shows for christ’s sakes, and if that gets the ratings and get’s the livingroom agitated, why the hell can’t the politicians do that? Why can’t Paul Martin go all Dr. Phil on Stephen Harper and vice-versa?
Perhaps something like this:
Martin: Now listen Stephen, I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear. I think you’re wrong about a lot of issues. I think, for example, you still harping on about gay-marriage and your infatuation for tax cuts isn’t good for the country. In a world of hate, why should we persecute and pick on people who simply want to love one another? And taxes are just an indirect way of paying for things that would cost you much more if that service was in the hands of a corporation.
Harper: I respect that point of view, but I disagree, and in the case of gay-marriage, I’ll have to respectfully disagree. But he’s thinking about respecting his poor old grandma and infatuated with the old white-picket fence vision of the world, because he thinks Adam and Steve isn’t the way the story should be told. My view is that people work hard for their money and such a large percentage of it shouldn’t be taxed away just so that you can redistrubute it in what was clearly an entranched crony system. The episode with Mr. Goodale is simply the latest example. There has to be a better way of running the country than you have for the past 12 years.
Layton: [interjecting] Can I say something ….
Moderator: No, it’s not your turn yet. And thus earning extra pay for pissing on the NDP. Mr. Duceppe, do you have anything to add?
Duceppe: No, it’s become rather clear that Canada doesn’t work, and so our aim of a sovereignty seems to make sense doesn’t it?
Given that the Conservatives are the ‘official opposition’ (that is, they came in a clear 2nd in the last election) CBC and the like think that means they are the clear second choice. And yet, we re-elected Liberals time and time again because we all hated Mulroney so much. The ’93 election decimated the Conservatives, and they lingered on with reduced numbers while the angry Westerners kept sending the Reform party to Ottawa, and for a time, the Bloc Quebecois was the ‘official opposition’. So after the Reform renamed itself to the Aliance and incorporated the old Progressive Conservatives into its ranks, (thereby making the voter who wanted Senate reform and less Quebec-centrism politics a conservative) suddenly they win enough seats to come in second.
And they booed Belinda Stronach when she spoke up at their convention last spring in support of gay marriage. The woman who, it was said, orchestrated to the merger of the parties, and then ran for its leadership. And then she dumped her boyfriend Mr. McKay to go become a Minister of something or other (what again?) by switching sides.
Oy vey.
So the story of Canadian politics over the past decade and half is more of a soap opera than of any social progress and implementation of policy that makes all of our lives better, the type of thing they were fond of doing in the 19th Century, when they thought a railway across the continent was a good idea, as were public schools. It was a trend you know, once, to care about the citizens and to build a future, and so, we got ourselves Medicare, which is now talked about as being ‘the soul of the country’ (John Doyle wrote that in the Globe last month, critiquing the documentary which in turn was critiquing ‘the funding mechanism’).
Merry Old England was derided by Napoleon as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’. Perhaps our partial English heritage is one of the reasons we get so attached to economic structures like funding mechanisms for doctors and hospitals, and department stores like Eatons and a corporation called the NHL. But ok, in that vein, let’s propose some 21st Century visions:
renticare: we figured out a way to keep people from paying medical bills when they get shot in Toronto, except now days they have to pay for the ambulance and all this other shit that should be free as well. But whatever … it seems to me that they’d be able to pay for the other things if they weren’t wasting money paying rent. Where does rent go? On the landlords’ mortgage or in their pocket … is that not true? It seems to me it’s a lateral transaction that simply enriches a few and improvishes many, kind of like what paying for an operation is like in the US. Them doctors, so rich, so expensive, that the poor just don’t go. Renticare baby – that’s the future. Homelessness would vanish, that seems pretty clear. No more sad stories and excuses and appeals from charities. It’s not like Ottawa can’t afford it, with its record surpluses for years now.
Instead we get Harper saying he’d give $100 buck a month to new families, and Paul Martin saying they’d pay for half the tuition for post-secondary students in their first and last years. Tuition, of course, being the cheapest part of the package, the living expense part being the real killer. (Everybody knows that the student loan program is simply a disguised subsidy to the beer companies). Which brings me to my second vision for the future of Canada:
wipe out student debt: why the hell should I have to pay back all this money, spent supporting the Halifax economy, and enriching a rich landlord? I look back now and say, I helped keep Shoppers Drug Mart, various bars, fast food restaurants and coffee shops going, and in turn, employing that many people. Then there was the tuition, which was a small percentage of the total debt. On top of this, I’m supposed to pay back interest, because I need to be taught a lesson of fiscal responsibility and be ushered into the wonderful modern world of usery. How else is our economy supposed to grow? How else are we going to make money, the governments ask, forgetting about their taxes, which are supposed to pay for social services, like child care programs, or the bureaucratic management of the government’s own grow-ops, producing weak marijuana for those to whom it’s medically sanctioned. Because of course, it’s devastating for society and our ethics that anyone get high in Canada, especially if they have cancer.
Student debt is a severe problem for our society, and yet no politician is talking about it (well, Layton’s said some things, but I’m forgetting he doesn’t count). Why not pay people to go to school instead?
classify students as workers: As Warren Wagar wrote, when he introduced this idea in his 1999 book, A Short History of the Future,‘all adult students were workers, whether their studies were undertaken to satisfy a market demand or not. Work had come to include the enlargement of the self, on the premise that every increase in personal capacity achieved without exploitation of the labor of others represented a net gain for the whole society of associated selves.’
By classifying students as workers, they’d be eligible to receive a wage. Imagine going to school as a job, graduating with a healthy bank account and not burdened by debt. Student Loan programs should be replaced with Student Subsidy ones. I can’t imagine any harm being done to our society by having an educated populace.
Rather, it seems to me that the whole point of the system (the job, the house, the lifestyle idea) is to help us be fully human, to enable us to enjoy our lives. And that simply can’t be done within the status quo. Without getting into the usual capitalist critique, the status quo is set up to divide us into demographic markets and sell us the idea of happiness, while keeping us bat-shit miserable so that the next commercial and Caribbean vacation will seem appealing.
Currently, we’re dealing with a system (inherited from a less kind world), that sets up the winner-loser dynamic throughout our lives. In Bowling for Columbine, the fellow who makes South Park explained the Columbine Massacre as being a result of that dynamic. The current media sensation of gun-violence in Toronto is also a result of that dynamic. We all deserve better. There’s no reason to think some people are just born stupid and are hopeless. If we’re going to have a percentage of the population who will always be useless, they might as well spend their time in university libraries to make the money for their pot purchase, which should have been made legal thirty years ago.
Which brings me to the last vision, and the links:
the most educated citizens in the world: As Michael Ignatieff said last spring, ‘let’s get the federal governments, the provincial governments, the municipal governments working together to make Canadians the best educated, most literate, numerate, and skilled people on the face of the earth’. This plays into the article by Timothy Brown, which I’ve linked to before, and one of the oddest sources of anything visionary. Outlining the world of a role-playing game called 2300 AD, he wrote of Canada:
‘A national effort began in the 22nd century to make Canada the higher education center of the world. A tremendous effort was put into motion at that time to attract great thinkers to Canada to teach, to build facilities which would draw students from around the world, and to build a worldwide reputation for superb education and positive results. Canada correctly recognized the economic potential in being a leader in education. Other nations eventually began sending students, as a matter of national policy, to Canada, not wanting to be left behind in the thinking of the age. By the end of the century Canada had achieved its goal and remains the uncontested master of higher education on Earth.’
As an artist, this got me to thinking about what kind of culture such students would find, and helped me consider the cultural legacy we (and I as a cultural worker) were building. For Ignatieff to be articulating this makes it seem possible, but then again, his chances of actually getting elected seem slim (which is merely another example of Liberal incompetence).
However, the century is still young, and the ‘leadership’ isn’t getting any younger, so there’s still time to make such ideas a reality. Unfortunately, they are not a choices to consider on January 23rd.
Working on picture.1 Went to R.R???s.2 Evette Volontaire came to interview Dad.3
_________________
1. This was a drawing I began on New Year’s Day. I remember taping 8 x 11s together to make a large surface. The drawing disappeared within a month as I recall, but I remember it as a kind of magnum opus.
2. R.R. was my best friend in grade school. We grew apart before reaching Junior High School.
3. Evette Volontaire was a reporter for a local newspaper, and she came by the house and interviewed my father about something at the kitchen table.
I’m borderline bored today. Read some of Sources of the Self but there’s too much talk of God. Read about how he thinks we may be in a watershed time (written though in the late 1980s) and spoke of how we have a hard time imagining old ideas like the divine right of kings. I’m at the point where I have a hard time imagining God ideas – although I remember faith, I’m working with a memory of an experience, which is different than actually feeling it as real today. It’s like my thoughts last week on myth – as something we’ve overcome, or something which served us and does no longer.I must say I’m particularly animated by the idea that I live in a complicated and technologically sophisticated civilisation. This is something Firefly helped bring to my awareness, through their contextualization of humans spread out across a new solar system, having packed up everything and moved it off world, where they felt free to begin the process of ecological destruction to build complicated early 21st Century cities all over again since there was now many worlds of resources at their disposal. And how Joss Whedon talked of wanting a show that was about ‘us’ – early 21st Century Americans (including Canadians) and revisiting the Western. And so you have a future five hundred years away in which everyone is using things we’re familiar with, like keyboards (no mysterious interfaces like on Star Trek and printed tee-shirts, and everything very familiar to us, as if we have in many ways plateaued, similarly to the way the candle and travel by horse was familiar to people across the centuries before the lightbulb.
So, the idea that I’m living in an emerging global civilization, which is so complex, but which enables me to do almost anything, I find interesting and exciting. To be here when it’s all new and fresh. And what this all means opposed to the Old World, and old world art and culture.
As an artist, I’ve struggled to find my voice and my place within the culture. I’ve also been caught up in the myopia of industry – to participate in the segregation, to go to openings, to party with fellow cultural workers, to read the poorly written and poorly thought documents, all the while not seeing the forest for the trees, and all the while looking in a rear-view mirror as it were: things from the past, and cultural movements better seen through hindsight. Getting lost in what it all means.
We are cut off in the end, from the experience of our lives, what it means to be alive now and to be comfortable with our selves. I sense a great trembling before uncertainty in this regard – the Buddhists who tell us we can be happy now and who want to enlighten us, wake us up to the wonder already here in our lives, but simply getting us to pay attention to our minds and our thinking – this is all seen with a sense of skepticism, but also, I think, there is a deep nostalgia for misery. So used to complaining and to being entertained through moving picture stories, we fear the length of our lives and the prospect of being bored.
Northrop Frye’s article on boredom vs. leisure summarizes the cultural wars I’ve witnessed in my still young life, and in the end lays it all on education … which broadens our perspectives to take in more than what the narrow view offers, the narrow view being by definition limited and quickly exhausted, so we find ourselves bored. The leisured, on the other hand, move through life being productive, pursuing their interests and by default contributing to society and civilization.
But what does any of this mean? What is it to contribute to humanity or civilization or to society? Those ideas were dissected by the post-structuralists which encouraged what Waggar called credicide, draining from our lives the sense of meaning which animated our imaginations and hence our lives – gave us that sense of certainty we seem to desire.
Perhaps our need for certainty is genetic, stemming from the days when uncertainty about yonder hill could get one eaten by a leopard. If that’s the case, we need a technology to deal with it. However, like our obesity problem, we’ve fallen victim to ancient biologies – comfort foods being comforting because of their fat content, which was very useful in scavenging days, but no longer. We now know this through science, and the concept of calories can help us control what we eat, in addition we know that to burn extra calories we need to exercise. But do we have similar knowledge to help us live with uncertainty? Is Buddhism such a technology?
The question is not one of who to make art for – fellow artists and further for collectors. But how to make something so that for the next thousand years, anyone (or at least, some) can see it or read it or whatever, and know that I was a human being just like they are, that I felt as they do sometimes, and in so doing, help bridge the gap of time, help them feel like they are part of the bigger story of civilization. So today, in 2005, I can read St. Augustine’ Confessions and recognize a fellow human being, and learn something of the context of those times. Again, people are still reading Tolstoy’s War & Peace which is set two hundred years ago, and in the process are learning a greater context.
If myth has died out in our age, one sees how that narrative culture we live in has replaced it. The past century was one resembling the wipe of a movie – the fade in or the fade out, how briefly the two images are combined in one still. The Old World of horses and carriages, inkwells and candles; of killing whales for oil, was replaced by a world where we dug oil out of the ground, to fuel our combustible engines for what was at first called a horseless carriage, and inkwells disappeared into speciality shops and art supply stores. Myth died and was replaced by the novel and movie, either projected in two to three hour stories on a large screen (replacing live theatre) or was divided up into half hour to an hour segments for the television machine of living rooms. Poetry, which was exulted for so long in so many cultures, disappeared too into specialty markets, replaced by the lyrics of pop music. Firefly suggests this new world will be with us for another five hundred years.
Picking up on the rear-view-mirror comment: one thinks of the side mirrors, and this past week I was trying to imagine what vision for a rabbit must be like, with it’s eyes on the side of it’s head, forward and backward in their periphery. How would their brains assemble the picture? Our eyes both face forward, overlapping, giving us and animals like us (apes and cats and so forth) binocular vision. I imagine something of what a rabbit experiences could be seen by placing two side view mirrors in front of us, at the angle so that we see the sweep behind, and are blinded near what we experience as front.
If hindsight then, is 20/20, one should further argue that this is the case for animals. The whole point of our lives since the beginning has seemed to be better than the animals. To be human is to see what’s in front of you clearly, and to be blind to what’s behind.
From my journal at the time, where I’d copied and translated it. From my Grade 10 French Class fifteen years ago, dated December 8 1990:
Where is Santa Claus?
Where is Santa Claus? To discover the answer to this question, I set about asking children. I asked nearly fifteen children when one told me where he lived really!All the others has said that Santa lived in the North Pole, but after all these answers, one walked into my interview room.
He had big red shoes on his feet and green pants, with a big yellow shirt. He had black hair and big ears.
I asked him his name. ‘Nerwin Tisslefoot,’ he answered. Then he told me…
‘I heard you were asking kids where Santa Claus lived. I’m 7 years old and I know. All the other children think he lives at the North Pole, but it isn’t true. Santa Claus (his real name in Filbert) lives everywhere in the world. In the winter, he lives in Siberia, where he catches his reindeer.
‘There (the name of the place is Northpolliqr) is a huge post office, where Filbert receives the merchandise orders and money from parents all over the world, who buy all the toys from him. On the 20 of December, he puts these great big 767 engines on the feet of his reindeer, Prancer, Dancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph. And on Rudolph, he puts a big red flashlight on his nose. On the 21st of December, he takes off from Northpolliqr, and he flies all over the world, delivering his merchandise to the parents who bought it. He buys all the VCRs, televisions, and toys in Siberia, even if everybody thinks Siberia is poor, but that idea, that is propaganda. It is really rich like the States, or Canada.
‘Anyhow, Filbert is in North America on the 24th – every year straight, never misses – and on the 25th, he flies back to Siberia. He de-hitches the 767 engines, gives his reindeer over to an old lady who looks after them during the year, and he catches the next flight to China.
‘At the beginning of January, Filbert enters his Buddhist monastery, and becomes a Buddhist monk until April, then he goes to Iraq.
You know, in Iraq, it’s the Islam religion, and they celebrate the birthday of Muhammad, like we celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ. And, like we give presents on Christ’s birthday, they give presents on Muhammad’s birthday. This year, Filbert gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait! That’s why Saddam doesn’t want to get out! He doesn’t want to give up his present!
‘After Filbert’s done in Iraq, he goes to Florida for the fall, to party down with the old timers down there.
‘After that, he’s in Siberia again, and the cycle begins anew. In fact, he’s there at this instant!’
Nerwin Tisslefoot finished his story. I said ‘Thank you Nerwin,’ and he left. I followed, wanting to go home, take about 20,000 aspirin for the migraine he’d given me, and go to bed.
The cultivation of the mind rather than cultivating the body
Yet there are many who do not cultivate either
So they are the ones who are told that so and so was gay, left handed, autistic, dyslexic – had whatever other condition
To make them ‘special’ so that you and I remain not special, when in reality, we cultivate neither our minds nor our bodies, and wallow in lumpen video game mediocrity, believing we cannot be taught, cannot achieve, and that one must be pathological in order to contribute.
There’s an interview with Slavoj Zizek from the Guardian which pretty much confirms my suspicions as to why I shouldn’t take him seriously – I first heard of him a couple of years ago through a friend who was briefly infatuated with his writing; then looking into it I found it unintelligible, and then further it became Lacan inspired nonsense, and now James Harkins has laid it all out for us, in an interview subtlety designed to impress those with my prejudices, which he perhaps shares.
My highlights:
A one-man heavy industry of cultural criticism, the 58-year-old Zizek has authored more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. His brand of social theory – a peculiar amalgam of Karl Marx, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the trash can of contemporary popular culture – has long afforded him a cult following among fashionable young academics.
Comment: Marx and Lacan are two examples of pseudo-science, and refering to the trash can of pop culture is to say that as trash perhaps it’s not something worth dealing with. Zizek appeals to ‘fashionable young’ academics – which is to say the naive, impressionable, and shallow. Would it not be true that to build arguments out of things not really worth considering is to build an argument itself not worth considering, the equivalent of fantasy?
If I were as fame hungry and vain as Zizek, I might want to start interpreting everything through the lens of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
No longer tethered to a single institution, Zizek spends his time roving between speaking engagements at institutions all over the world. He is leaving London first thing tomorrow, he tells me, for Paris to be profiled by the newspaper Libèration. Then he is off to headline a Design Congress in Copenhagen (“??7,500,” he shouts to me, still under the photographer’s cosh, “first-class everything, and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff”) and then it is back to Slovenia.
Comment: First class everything, eh? Not bad for a Revolutionary Marxist. The type that overthrows exploitative aristocracy to become aristocracy themselves. Some animals are more equal than others.
On April 1 this year (“a great day to get married”), he married a 27-year-old Argentinian former lingerie model and now spends one third of his time in Slovenia looking after his young son from a former marriage, a third of his time with his new wife in Buenos Aires, and the rest of his time on the road.
Comment: Here we have the degradation of men, especially of older men, who are represented as commitment phobic and chasing after women young enough to be their daughters. Here we have Zizek knocking up a ‘former lingerie model’ which is to say, she had nice tits and an exemplary body, and probably cannot converse at Zizek’s level when it comes to ideas. Zizek has a child from a former marriage, which is also to imply that the lingerie model is a home-wrecker. Zizek, being the ethical fellow we know him to be (“Come on,” he says. “I don’t have any problem violating my own insights in practice.”) could not resist the temptation offered by his new wife. In the end, one is left with thinking: what a fucking bastard.
And not to mention the whole thing about him resembling Jesus.
Northrop Frye, from The Educated Imagination (1962):
So you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.
What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action. Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way that the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process. When experience is removed from us a bit, as the experience of the Napoleonic was is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there’s a tremendous increase of dignity and exhilaration. I mention Tolstoy because he’d be the last writer to try and glamorize the war itself, or pretend that its horror wasn’t horrible. There is an element of illusion even in War and Peace, but the illusion gives us a reality that isn’t in the actual experience of the war itself: the reality of proportion and perspective, of seeing what it’s all about, that only detachment can give. Literature helps to give us that detachment, and so do history and philosophy and science and everything else worth studying. But literature has something more to give peculiarly its own: something as absurd and impossible as the primitive magic is so closely resembles.
Earlier this year I had the misfortune of attending an abysmal presentation by a visiting academic at one of Toronto’s universities. Afterward, over drinks with my companion, we talked about my dislike for what we had experienced. I wasn’t too fond of the theorizing, having come to see psychoanalysts and their spawn (Lacan and his followers) as practitioners of a pseudo-science, and their theory disconnected from anything I’ve ever considered real. My friend spoke of refinement, that participating and discussing ideas at that level was form of distinction, and sophistication. Her arguments immediately made me think of this by John Ralston Saul, which I’d recently read. I think he convinced me when he threw in the bit about the shoes.
White Bread Post-modern urban individuals, who spend their days in offices , have taken to insisting that she or he is primarily a physical being equipped with the muscles of a work-horse and the clothes of a cowboy. The rejection of white bread in favor of loaves compacted with the sort of coarse, scarcely ground grains once consumed solely by the poor follows quite naturally.
White bread is the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its ideological conclusion: essential goods originally limited by their use in daily life have been continually refined until all utility has been removed. Utility is vulgar. In this particular case, nutrition and fibre were the principal enemies of progress. With the disappearance of utility what remains is form, the highest quality of high civilizations.
And whenever form presides, it replaces ordinary content with logic and artifice. The North American loaf may be tasteless but remains eternally fresh thanks to the efficient use of chemicals. The French baguette turns into solidified sawdust within two hours of being baked, which creates the social excitement of having to eat it the moment it comes out of the oven. The Italians have introduced an intriguing mixture of tastes – hands towels on the inside and cardboard in the crust. The Spanish managed to give the impression of having replaced natural fibre with baked sand. There are dozens of other variations. The Greek. The Dutch. Even the world of international hotels has developed its own white roll.
In each case, to refine flour beyond utility is to become refined. This phenomenon is by no means limited to bread or even food. Our society is filled with success stories of high culture, from men’s ties to women’s shoes.
In his book on Northrop Frye1, Jonathan Hart describes Roland Barthes as attacking the myths of ‘the bourgeoisie’ and stating that for Barthes, the problem with what is often translated as ‘middle class’ was its inability to imagine the other. Thus, I go through artschool being informed and taught these Marxist ideas, and for a time immediately after graduating am prone to denounce middle-class values as bourgeois.
Then I read Steven Pinker’s account of the middle class (in The Blank Slate, p.416, in his chapter on art), which I had to agree with:
As for sneering at the boureoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsilbilty, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members of good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the 20th Century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it’s none of our damn business.
The problem of imagining the other is still with us, but like everything has been updated to a new century’s context. ( I’m inclined to say it’s generational in one regard – my parents certainly have this problem, but my parents are also political and social conservatives).
The problem of imagining the other was clear to me in the article I read yesterday by Anthony Harrigan, called ‘History, the Past, and Inner Life’ (PDF) which seemed interesting at first but then became intolerable. He seems to argue that while in the past there has been a connection between a technically advanced society and barbaric behavior (the Nazis) he seems to imply that one cause the other, which is nonsense. He says this of the culture of the United States:
One has only to look at the ‘entertainment’ industry media in the United States. The technology of the electronic media is unparalleled in the world, but much of the comment is hostile to the values of our inherited civilization. The tide of pornography is rising, flooding the internet, exposing the average user to the most vile images.
Which was the first thing to make me suspicious. Then he goes on to write:
Dr. McClay has pointed out that an increasing number of academic historians strive to ‘demonstrate that all our inherited institutions, beliefs, conventions, and normative values are arbitrary ???social construction in the service of power???and therefore without legitimacy or authority.’
An argument to which I’m sympathetic, since I don’t have such a negative view of humanity to see them as all power greedy, preferring the Buddhist view that all beings desire happiness. His point though is raised in order to say the following:
We see this process at work in the effort to de-legitimize the institution of marriage established as a religiously ordained estate between a man and a woman. Judicial validation of ‘civil unions’ between homosexuals undermines the most fundamental institution of our society, monogamous marriage. It opens the door to polygamy and every sort of perverted sexual activity, including bestiality.
Which is of course bullshit, and our first clear example of this fellow being unable to imagine the other. And yet, when reading this yesterday, Marxist terms filtered through French semiology did not pop into my mind; instead I had the realization that I was reading the right-wing point of view.
One reads on, to find this gem of intolerance (the emphasis within is mine):
In this era in which leftist social doctrines prevail, it isn???t surprising that great emphasis is placed on multiculturalism in schools and colleges. The aim in promoting multiculturalism is to downgrade or disavow the culture of our nation and civilization. In many educational institutions, for instance, students are launched into the culture of India before they study the culture of the United States and the Western world. This is a deliberate process designed to underscore the point that our American and Western history and values do not have primacy. Multiculturalism leaves those exposed to it morally disoriented and rootless. Students are supposed to learn that there is nothing special about our traditions; no one is to regard them as having authority in life. A mishmash of culture is ladled out so that young people are without authoritative guidance in adopting values. Those who want to downgrade our traditions and values have what the writer Joan Didion has referred to as ???preferred narratives.??? These narratives have as their central theme that the United States has an oppressive society and has been that way from the start. They regard the Constitution of the United States as a conspiracy against the powerless. They choose to depict minorities as victims regardless of the particular circumstances.
Here I see the power of freedom of speech and thought, to be able to read something I find offensive but which gives me a privileged glismpe into answering the question we express nowadays with ‘WTF?’
What the fuck they are thinking is that multiculturalism is to degrade one’s own culture? How about the idea that we take our congenital cultures for granted – that we don’t need to appreciate them since we are living within it, and see The Other as offering us different perspectives. One thing that Mr. Harrigan does throughout is to talk of ‘our culture, and our civilization’, dividing the world into haves and have nots, closing the door to ‘guests’ in a sense. One detects a distinctive lack of welcome in his use of words.
How does one claim a culture with such certainty? And I think it needs to be asked, why should anyone be so proud of the parochial, patriarchal American culture, so sure of itself, that it doesn’t require the perspectives of other experiences? As Kurt Vonnegut brought up in his recent appearance on The Daily Show in a sarcastic defense of the situation in Iraq, a new democracy takes 100 years to free its slaves, and 150 years to give women the vote, and that at the beginning of democracy, quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite ok.
Why is it about the Right that seems to require this sense of certainty? The argument here seems to be that Mr. Harrigan is so weak-minded that being exposed to the Kama Sutra will cause him to indulge in hedonistic pleasures of which he never dreamed, instead of simply saying, ‘that’s not for me’? You encounter this weak-mindedness with their talk on God and morality – that without God existing, there’d be no reason for moral rules, and than what do you do? How about continue to treat others well because, as it’s been said by many a previous Christian, ‘a good deed is its own reward’?
My ultimate point here though is to say that talk of ‘the bourgeoisie’ is outdated, and that to be able to make the same points being made 50 years ago by the likes of Roland Barthes, one talks of ‘the right wing’ or ‘conservatives’. Which is a little unfortunate – a conservative streak in society that builds museums, ‘to conserve’ is welcome and necessary, but one that fails to imagine other cultures and appreciate their differences and the perspectives those differences offer is simply toxic.
So, according to my sister’s boyfriend, who witnessed it, there was a nude jumper this morning on the DVP. He jumped off one of the overpasses near the BMW facility (either Queen St or Eastern Ave). Of course, they didn’t bother to tell us that on the evening news. Instead, Global gave us a report of increased cycle-cops around schools to intimidate the 16 year old out on bail (whose face was graciously blurred).
Now, I understand that there’s something like at least one suicide a week on the TTC, but they don’t want to make the actual numbers public. It would seem they prefer the accuracy of innuendo and rumour. The same is true for people like this morning’s fellow, who (if successful) chose to leave the earth as buck naked as when he arrived. I’ll credit him with some performance art originality.
But why the silence? Why do news editors everywhere think we should care about the car wrecks and murders? I haven’t been murdered lately, I don’t plan to be anytime soon. But what business is it of yours if I am? The same goes for the car accident. If anything, that’ll be between the insurance companies. I’ll concede it’s everyone’s business inasmuch as it ties up traffic, but beyond that I don’t want or need to know. Isn’t it true that murders are rarely random, but usually are the culmination of some dispute?
We may live in a time when Dr. Phil thinks the whole of the United States and Canada needs to witness the tawdry details of some family’s anguish (today’s episode on incest for christ’s sakes) which completely disregards the reasons for confidentially in the first place.
Let’s be clear here: there are some things of which it is none of our business. I don’t want to know the problems of some abused family, unless I’m in the position of needing to help. But I’m not a priest, a counselor, a psychiatric worker, a bail officer, etc. And if I was, I’d be under strict gag laws. Confidentiality exists as much for the benefit of society as it does for the relevant parties. I for one felt I didn’t need to know the details of Dr. Phil’s incestuous family, and quickly changed the channel in disgust. (For those of you who advertise during his time slot, why not start sending that money to the Red Cross?)
The arrest of the local pedophile, the murder of an abused wife, or the coke habit of the local hoodlum, the grow-op of our neighbors … all this is brought out to be part of the public record. This news is supposed to do what? If anything, it makes us feel less safe, but Toronto remains one of the safest cities in the world, and what crime exists just seems part of life. And given that seems a large portion of this crime is all drug related, it makes me think the only reason we keep our stupid drug laws in place is to ensure the police job security.
Anyway, I for one want to know how many people think Toronto is too awful to live in. I would like to have some understanding of the suicide rate. Because all the regular crime gets reported, I’m able to sit here and think it’s relatively low, compared with other places. I get to formulate what understanding I bring to the issue, and feel rather safe in the metropolis. But I can’t say the same for the depressed, the scared, the anguished, the people who need help but haven’t gotten it, for those for whom society has failed.
I’m reminded of Charles Taylor‘s thoughts now. Taylor, a philosopher originally from McGill (and doing the scholar circuit the last few years – he was at U of T a year ago) argues that while the Modernist philosophical tradition begins with Descartes’ introspection, our reality is really one comprised of dialogue. You might think that you are, but Decartes began the line of telling the rest of us. You cannot exist alone. Our lives are comprised of conversations, and even this writing is part of a conversation frozen into our alphabet’s symbols. The comments section below are there for your side, your contribution.
It is because we are social creatures that the news exists – all these reporters on the street talking to some box on someone’s shoulder would be absurd if they didn’t see themselves are part of a larger stream involving the unanimous and anonymous audience. They talk and therefore they are.
And as social creatures, we want to understand our place in society, so we have a tendency to gossip. So the news thinks we might be interested in the painful stories of people who can’t get along, and instead of being useful and warning us that there’s some psycho out there, instead we only get the news after they’ve been arrested (and hence, this is why I don’t really care about this type of news, it always comes after the crimes have been committed in the first place).
But suicides are a death built around the Cartesian model of introspection. I think I’m depressed and therefore I am. I think I can’t go on and therefore I can’t. They represent failures of our society to reach out the necessary hand, to bring someone into a relationship, to involve someone in a dialogue. Murders are crimes of passion, they involve at least two people, one of which is cruel. A suicide is an act of loneliness, involving only one person, whom people in general don’t care enough about. We extend our hard heartedness to not even mentioning their deaths on the news.
Is it because it’s shameful to kill oneself? Is it a left-over from Christianity, when suicides wouldn’t even be given a funeral? Is the TTC’s reluctance to talk about the people who kill themselves on its tracks because they think it’s morbid? The same must be said for the Go Trains, who regularly have ‘accidents’ involving pedestrians. With such a rate of ‘accidents’ that they show, it’s a wonder they haven’t been shut down has a safety hazard.
Morbidity doesn’t usually stop the news – how much more morbid is it to show us pictures of blown up buses in Israel? I clipped a few over the past couple of years, fascinated in that morbid way by the scenes of bodies frozen in death.
And even over the past week, with the catastrophe in New Orleans, the news is showing us anonymous rotting black bodies, which bring a grunt of awfulness from me, but also help me understand just how bad things are down there.
My point here is that the news has no problem feeding morbid curiosity. So why not go that step further and tell us about suicides?
Regarding the argument of selfishness and shame – when Kurt Cobain killed himself, all the fans were like, ‘what an asshole’ and bitched about his selfishness. That always seemed stupid to me. Are you saying then, that your selfishness is such that you’d prefer he stuck around suffering just so that you can go on buying Nirvana CDs? That was my argument at the time.
It’s not shameful to kill oneself. It’s an act of desperation, or if you’re a terrorist, of idiocy. If you’re so past caring about this world to want to live in it, what do you care about shame? And why should we as a society, continue to take their actions personally?
If you’re of the school that it’s a condemnation of our company, then I suppose I can see where you’re coming from, but I’d like to think we’re bigger than denying them identity out of a petty sense of insult. I mean, our world is pretty screwed up, and those that leave it voluntarily are probably saving themselves a lot of grief. But at the same time, I’d like to understand their motivations, their criticisms, in order to help improve the situation.
The news wants us to believe we live in a cruel world, full of crime and the winners of sports where one person or group defeats another in glorious competition. By denying us the reports of the losers, who validate its cruelty, they aren’t allowing us the chance to think about what’s wrong with the picture, and how it could change.
To the naked jumper: rest in peace wherever you are.
“The criticism is all the sharper because the President did nothing to alter his holiday schedule for 48 hours. Vice-President Dick Cheney remains on holiday in Wyoming. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, returned to Washington after being seen shopping for $7,000 shoes in Manhattan as New Orleans went under.”
Reminds me of another callous bitch who once suggested they should just eat cake. For fucks sakes, I’m glad these s-o-b’s aren’t my government.
I spent a week in Maine at the end of July, mostly reading fat books but every now and then giving my mind a rest with some channel surfing. The impression I got from my sampling of pure American television was that their reputation for being not to bright seemed well deserved. In that broadcast environment, even PBS looked dopey. I found myself really missing TVO and the CBC.
But, having come to see how great the CBC is, and how important it is to our television recipes, I can’t say I very much care about the current lockout. Because it’s been August, and I see it as part of the vacation – the usual cancon channels on radio and TV are whacked and so what? I can handle it. It’ll be over eventually. In addition, I do have lots of books to read and TV is mostly a waste of time, especially in the summer. I also have a new gig which means I’m not doing my regular home-office hours anymore, with CBC Newsworld on it the kitchen to give me something to listen to – I’m out and about and ignoring daytime TV.
Perhaps I’m just not facing the reality that it could go on and on like that hockey thing. I hear though that it could go on for at least 7 weeks – oh well. I mean, Peter Mansbridge didn’t get to fly to New Orleans to report from the scene, and who really cares? (Wasn’t it kind of disturbing the way all the reporters took the Boxing Day tsunami as an excuse to get out of the frigid continent for a few days … ?) I’ve had CNN on the past couple of days for those hours when I am ‘in the office’ because I have to orient myself to the reality that Louisiana now has more in common with Bangladesh than it does Ontario. Disasters do have a certain fascination and inspire a kind of awe, but it almost seems a good thing that I’m not getting a Canadian perspective on this story.
Anyway, with that nod to current events out of the way, I want to talk about the bigger picture of this CBC dispute. I think I dreamt about it last night, having some conversation about it, where I said that it being a lockout means that the CBC in effect fired their entire staff. In the first week, lots of people joked that the CBC is actually better now than the big egos have been temporarily put out to sidewalk. This sort of division in power – management versus the personalities and support staff, suggests the CBC is a creature with two heads and can function just fine with one. That’s a little disconcerting since it suggests massive and expensive redundancy. But redundancy is a good thing, so that’s not really worth complaining about nor should it be eliminated.
Let’s say this then: we are less than 6 months away from 2006, when we will undoubtedly be living ‘in the future’. The past six years have had a sort of legendary character -first we ‘partied like it was 1999’, than we were living ‘in the year 2000’ and then we re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’, enjoyed the palindromic character of 2002, and the past three years, (’03, ’04, ’05) have still seemed like an extension of the 1990s.
But now, everything is beginning to be different. While the belief amongst marketers is that ‘one should never launch a new product in August’ this past month has laid the foundations for the next ten to twenty years of common perception (at least in Canada) – a time frame which makes up the first quarter of the 21st Century.
The American nightly newscasters are all gone (Rather, Brokaw, Jennings), there’ve now been two natural disasters which remind us of our impotence in the face of natural forces, and Hollywood ain’t what it used to be, as the summer receipts show. Michael Ignatieff has gone from being an esoteric academic to being touted as the next Prime Minister (returning from Harvard to take up a post at U of T) – and if pigs fly in the next five years and that comes to pass, he’ll do so under Governor General Michaelle Jean. And the CBC has had a labour disruption, which threatens the broadcast schedule of new season of an updated version of hockey.
Like the guns of August 1914, it seems easy enough to ignore these developments at the moment, not yet conscious of the bigger picture, but let’s consider the following:
René Lévesque used to be a CBC personality in Quebec in the 1950s, until the 1959 68 day (two month) strike. The fact that the French CBC strike was allowed to go for so long embittered Lévesque toward Ottawa. He later said something to the effect that the English CBC would not have been allowed a two-month strike, and would have been forced to and end much sooner. The lengthy disruption in Quebec, in his opinion, showed how little English-dominated Ottawa cared about what happened in la belle province. And so Levesque went into politics ….
(As it is, only Jack Layton is demanding an immediate return of Parliament, and that’s to deal with this softwood-lumber, death of NAFTA thing. All those anti-globalization protests of the late 90s now seem like so much, ‘we told you so’. Ottawa clearly does not yet care about the CBC. Nor do I as I’ve mentioned do I – I mean, does anybody miss George Stroumboulopoulos’s show? … I can’t even remember what it’s called as I type this. So much for their efforts to win over my demographic).
So, point one – this lockout might have significant consequences. And in one way, it already has, since it’s forced podcasting to a new level. I’m not really on the podcasting bandwagon – I find it all rather pretentious. Everyone faking up a radio-like sounding thing and treating it as this new and great thing, and it’s only a trendy way to talk about an mp3 file, which have been around for what, eight years now?
I guess the difference is that mp3s have tipped past bootleg music because almost everyone in an urban core seems to have a fairly sophisticated computer and a high speed connection (and if they have a job they can afford an iPod to listen to their mp3 collection with).
You have radio stations like 102.1 CFNY The Edge offering Allan Cross’s The Ongoing History of New Music podcasts, and no, they aren’t the archived shows (which would be awesome), but some 1 minute clip, effectively acting as teaser advertising for the radio show. That is not worth a trend. Jumping on a downloading bandwagon and offering your readers/listeners irrelevant shit I find tries my patience – especially since one had to wait for the download to complete before being disappointed.
Via Tod Maffin’s site, cbcunplugged.com, we get to listen to phone messages. Oh boy. Nevertheless, this cat is out of the bag. While the content is rather lame, I’m excited by the fact that the employs have embraced the possibilities of this type of broadcasting. The upcoming CBC Unlocked will be something worth checking out.
It shows creative thinking that the management seems to lack, and it also seems like the type of thing which is allowed to happen because it’s unfiltered by office politics and bureaucracy and the like. Whatever happens at the CBC after this is all over, I hope they bring this back the mother corp.
(Which raises another thing: according to iTunes, the CBC3 podcast is number 1 in terms of popularity. It seems to be unaffected by the labour dispute. Why?)
Last week I listened to a couple of mp3 files from Australian radio of my favorite thinker, Mr. John R. Saul. He was on he tour promoting his globalization book, and he brought up his point that the economics of the past 25 years reminds him of 18th Century mercantilism. And so perhaps it follows that the bloging reminds me of the type of pamphleteering that helped spark the American and French Revolution. In those days, you wrote something, you went to a printer, and it was on the street in an hour. In the two centuries since, the middlemen of editors and marketers filled the offices of the publishing houses until reject letters became a writer’s rite of passage.
In his previous books, Saul likened the explosion of instant publishing in the 18th Century with a trend where a public of common people began trying to make themselves heard over the dominant voice of those in power. Post-modernism, inasmuch as it was the academic expression of trying to express what had remained unexpressed (because it had been put down by a dominant voice, in this case, the Modernist aesthetic and philosophical ideology) is nothing more than the first wave of people expressing themselves to those in power. (Ironic then how pomo has become noxious power itself). First radio and then television gave voice to the whole other segment of society which had been discriminated against by those who thought they were better than average. Jerry Springer’s infamous show isn’t so much a parade of ‘trash’ as it is a reminder of human variety, and especially of the need for adequate social and education programs.
Blogs and podcasting are continuations of this trend. As Saul wrote it, when things get too literary and language becomes too controlled by certain experts (whether post-modernist writers who can’t string a proper sentence together, or the rise in corporate ways of speaking so that every idea becomes inarticulate) there is a backlash, a corresponding balancing rise in the speech of everyday.
Humans are creatures of sound – and it is only with training that we become creatures of print. The rhythms of everyday speech will always seem more natural and be more effective at communicating than any purple prose from some show-off snob.
So I think blogs are great for that since their style is one that lends itself to being written as if it were spoken. I certainly think this way when I write – I’m confident enough in my ability to write well that I see no need to show off and am thankful to avoid the embarrassment of academic writing.
And now that a medium has come along which allows both text and voice files to be easily broadcast – we’re witnessing some kind of media utopia, and I remind you that utopia means ‘no place’ and the internet certainly has no place, and like the universe, having no centre, it is everywhere. Naming his perfect place utopia was a way of Thomas More to say that perfection is impossible, but perhaps that is true only when talking about material, human things, and not immaterial shadows of electricity.
For now we have a medium by which a locked-out staff at a national broadcaster can continue writing and speaking, and we now choose to download it and listen to it when we want. We are no longer forced to wait until their re-broadcast time or pay $20 if we want to hear it again. For one thing it’s shameful that the CBC last year stopped providing mp3 files of their shows; let’s hope this populism amongst their worker bees will break their outdated media models once and for all once everything gets back to normal.
And so, the last four months of the mid-decade year will be interesting times, as we watch a new status quo begin to develop. While the CBC lockout seems insignificant, it is part of a bigger picture that includes new hockey, new politics, new ways of speaking and listening to the masses, and new disasters that remind us of bigger pictures and long-term consequences. Whether or not the egos at the CBC return to their soapboxes anytime soon, our lives are way more interesting going into this autumn than they were a year ago. Hollywood may be complaining about a summer slump, and no wonder. It’s far more entertaining and engaging to simply pay attention to events.
I spent a week in Maine at the end of July, mostly reading fat books but breaking from that with some channel surfing now and then. The impression I got from my sampling of pure American television was that it is no wonder the Americans are seen to be stupid all over the world (even PBS looked dopey) and that I really missed both TVO and the CBC.
But, having come to see how great the CBC is, and how important it is to our television recipes, I can’t say I very much care about the current lockout. Because it’s August, and I see it as part of the vacation – the usual channels on radio and TV are whacked and so what? I can handle it. It’ll be over eventually.
I guess I’m just not facing the reality that it could go on and on like that hockey thing. Something has told me from the start that it has a 3 week timeline. This is week two – there’s another week to go and then I’ll get annoyed.
It’s been a while since I posted … been a busy summer and such. And my art grumpiness has reached the level of ‘why bother?’ and so I’ve avoided a lot of shows in favour of reading biographies of Goethe. But on Friday night, I went out to the opening at Zsa Zsa, since it was the last show there ever.
After seven years, Andrew Harwood is giving up his gallery and moving out of the back. Zsa Zsa has been both a home and a business, but the business side never dominated his commitment to giving people an opportunity to show. In the past, he’s advertised the gallery as showing ‘the best and the worst of Toronto’ which brought a laugh out of me, since my show there in February of 2003 followed what I thought was something abysmal. As a rental gallery, Zsa Zsa was one of those open venues by which people could seek immediate reaction and criticism from an audience – and if anything sold, Andrew didn’t take a cut.
Harwood took over the space from Myfanwy Ashmore, Shannon Cochrane, and Keith Manship who pre-Zsa Zsa called the space the In/Attendant Gallery. Now, with Harwood’s departure, Paul Petro is taking over the space and so-far is planning on using it to exhibit some of his multiple collection.
For the final month, Andrew put together a couple of shows, the first of which opened on August 5th, and was dedicated to the theme of pot. I was away for that one but I heard it was quite a party, with 300+ people showing up. The second show opened last Friday night, dedicated to magic, or as Harwood wrote in his PR: ‘[it] is a simple show that celebrates the sweet magic of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. This show lauds those folks and that place. Sweetness, magic and light’. Featuring Christina Zeidler, R.M. Vaughan, Will Munro, Maryanne Barkhouse, Fastwürms, Allyson Mitchell, Michael Belmore and Andrew Harwood, Bedknobs & Broomsticks is a nice little show which seemed to open on the right day – with that days thunderstorms reeking havoc across the city, the magic and withcraftery fit right in.
Now, there’s something going on in this city with regard to knitted wool. And in the way that strands of wool can come together to form a blanket or a sweater via a network, there is a network of relationships operating on those two blocks and expressing itself in the material of which sweaters are made of.
Andrew is one of Paul Petro’s artists, as are Will Munro, Allyson Mitchell, and Fastwurms. So it makes since that these artists are in this final show, as much as it does that it is Petro who is taking over the space. In as much as the artist community of Toronto is fractal – that is, divided up into ever smaller communities until only power couples and those with an overdose of self-esteem are left – the community in which Harwood finds himself is one that has been actively working out an ‘afghan aesthetic’ over the past couple of years. Allyson Mitchell and Will Munro have both used appropriated afghan blankets in their recent work, and while Cecilia Berkovic is not one of Petro’s artists, she has brought this to her work with Instant Coffee and especially to the room she designed for the Gladstone Hotel (viewable here).
Allyson Mitchell’s piece in this show is one of her collaged images based on shag carpeting, in this case that of a sasquatch terrorizing something. My conversation with her that night got into my recent trip to my hometown in Nova Scotia. I was telling her about how one of my friends there had a stuffed bear head on his wall, and from there we talked about taxidermy, as her piece uses taxidermy glass eyes and a bear nose.
Will Munro has a wonderful piece which I really liked, consisting of four axes tied together with loops of coloured yarn, using a 70s colour scheme of orange and brown. While axes are supposed to be dangerous objects, their shiny newness and their interaction with the yarn make this piece seem pleasurable and safe. This wool based aesthetic I find really comforting in a way, and given that it’s presence in this show follows the show dedicated to pot, I’m reminded of what someone once told me about what it feels like to be high – ‘you know when you’re a kid and you get up early on a Sunday morning, and it’s chilly, and you come downstairs and wrap yourself in an nice blanket, and how cozy that is? That’s what it feels like to be high’. Yes, comfort and coziness are as associated in my mind with afghan blankets as they were in my stoner friend’s, and thus I welcome this development in the Toronto scene, and it’s reflection in this last show at a gallery which helped foster it’s development through friendships.
But not all the pieces reflect the afghan school. The space is dominated by Maryanne Barkhouse’s piece, which many people thought was a dance floor, and asked if they could step on it. Consisting of a grid of images within a metal frame, and standing up about 6 inches from the floor, the images tell a beaver’s story.
RM Vaughan’s video continues in his theme (present at least in his video works) of self-disappointment. This time, he’s speaking of his belief that 40 year old gay men do not have mid-life crisis’s – rather, they go on tourist vacations, to tourist landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. Richard is best known as a writer, and as such his monologue, playing through the headphones attached to the monitor, is worth listening to – which I write since so often I at least would rather not put headphones on to watch a video.
The window is dominated by the work of the Fastwürms – mushrooms and fake cakes, it is one of the most ‘magical’ pieces of all. The Wurms (which I’m supposed to write FASTWÜRMS -all caps with an umlaut) work consists of what they have called at various times ‘witch drag’ and so this piece and some of the others in the show fit in with this stream of work. While I don’t share the FASTWÜRMS’ love of witchcraft and magic, I do appreciate there work an awful lot, since they’re an example that something finely made and considered is always more interesting than some kind of crap that tries to get away with the heroics of ‘I can do that with my eyes closed’ sloppiness which artists glorify with the term ‘loose’. While virtuosity has its place, so does craftsmanship, and Fastwürms’ finely made things are force me to pay attention to take what they’re doing seriously.
Anyway, this last ever show closes to walk-ins on the 28th, but can be still seen by appointment until the 30th (which would require a phone call to 416-537-3814).
Bedknobs & Broomsticks
Until August 30th at
Zsa Zsa Gallery
962 Queen Street West
During the summer I’ve been reading up on Johann von Goethe. Somewhere someone noted that when Goethe died the first photographs had been taken, but this having happened in 1832, he never had a chance to sit for a portrait. Nevertheless, I tried to imagine his features (known from drawings and paintings and widely available via the web) in the grayscale of a 19th Century photograph.
Given that with a computer one can do almost anything, last night I sat down to see if I could make something. Imagine then that photography had been invented 20 years earlier, and that the famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had sat for a portrait in 1828. Of the two images I worked on last night, this one is the most successful.
Subject:London Terror
From: Timothy Comeau
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:24:29 -0400
To: today@cbc.ca
Admittedly, as soon as I heard about this on this morning’s radio I turned on the television to, for lack of a better phrase, ‘witness the spectacle’. Given how two weeks ago you (CBC) suddenly dropped the Karla Homolka story in favor of a full day’s coverage to the events, and how you seem about to be doing the same thing today, it occurs to me that you are complicit in the terrorism by giving these jerks all the attention they want. Would they be so quick to set off bombs and kill and maim if they knew the media would ignore it in favour of Tom Cruise’s love-struck antics? I saw on the ticker that 15 people died in Iraq today, but you’re quite comfortable in burying that story. Breaking News story spectacles are part of the problem, and are never informative. Why not wait until you can actually inform me of something, and give me news I can use, not water cooler gossip?
Craig Francis Power has written me a couple of letters from St. John’s, the latest deals with the latest controversy with The Rooms and Gordon Laurin’s firing.
Now, while the news channels today are creaming themselves about being able to devote another full day to the crumbs fed to them by the London police, we should remember that in the long run, visual culture and literature is where a society’s memory lies, and certainly not at the news desks of CBC and CNN, where, they tell us that today’s bombing occurred two weeks after the first round. No shit. I wasn’t born yesterday.
Goodreads began partially because of what I read by John Taylor Gatto in an autumn issue of Harper’s magazine a couple of years back:
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
And that stayed with me. Then, last winter’s readings of John Ralston Saul drove the point home:
“There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for their society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their elites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them. […] It’s not that everyone must understand everything; but those who are not experts must see that they are being dealt with openly and honestly; that they are part of the process of an integrated civilization. They will understand and participate to the best of their ability. If excluded they will treat the elites with an equal contempt”.
London Bombings
Bombers in London are suffering from a lack of imagination, by which they can’t relate to society at large. I’m reminded of something Mark Kingwell wrote ten years ago discussing crime statistics in the U.S. and noting that for some the conditions of poverty were so severe that going to jail was a step up, guaranteeing shelter and three meals a day. (Such motivations have also led many people into the military over the past couple of centuries as well).
One then begins to see that these suicide bombers are trying to escape their lives. And, as the media would like us to think – they all appear normal, aren’t in dire poverty. They always come across as a middle-class, albeit in some cases, lower middle class. Instead, we have a situation analogous to the suicides of Canada’s north, where the Inuit children, after years of sniffing gasoline for cheap and brain-destructive highs, are hanging or shooting themselves. We have a pretty good idea as to why those kids are self-destructive, and that is because ‘they have no culture’, the story being that the misguided intentions of a century ago to assimilate the native populations did terrible damage to their sense of self as a culture, and in effect, destroyed their imaginations. The imagination of themselves and their place in the world, in the grand scheme of things.
And so, I want to say that suicide bombers are suffering from a lack of imagination. That they are choosing to die, and to escape into the paradisiacal world (the only thing, one imagines, that has preoccupied their imagination for years) rather than continuing to live their dreary, industrialized, modernist, post-modernist, (or whatever other name we throw at it) lives.
Those of us who despise reality television and other aspects of pop culture choose do so because we feel that we have better things to occupy our imagination – great books, the art of contemporary galleries – ‘cinema’ as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters…. but if you’re a child of immigrants, and don’t identify either with your parents or fully with your peers, and instead your imagination is stimulated by religion …. it doesn’t seem to be so mysterious now does it, why these kids would do what they do.
We imagine ourselves, develop ambitions, or at least have plans for the future – next vacation and so forth. Imagining ourselves and our place in the world is terribly important in helping give us a sense of context, and in carrying out our daily activities. Our love for stories feeds this sense of imagination – and we feel more alive when our life is echoed in the imagination – it is a resonance chamber by which we build symphonies of meaning.
The Rooms
The tension in St. John’s is one of two imaginative visions: an elite version (which I suppose would be Laurin’s camp) and one down-home version (the CEO’s camp). Now, admittedly, I’m not in St. John’s and am only working with what I’ve read (today’s links) but let’s look at it according to Saul’s take on elitism. I believe, as does Saul, that people want what’s best. That only seems like common sense. Yes, the elites, and especially art-elites, do form a sort of tribe which treats people outside of it with an element of contempt. They think they are engaged in what’s best. They think that the lobster-trap craft folk are uneducated and misguided and have the blinders on towards ‘what’s best’. Hence, tension.
Ok, that being said, it does seem to me that Craig Power has a point where he writes, “Newfoundlanders have a reputation for being stupid, inbred and drunk. With the events of the past week and a half, is there any reason to wonder why?” having set it up by saying, “Wanda Mooney, a career government administrator, has been installed as interim director. … I don’t know what this woman’s knowledge of art history or contemporary art practice is, but I do know that if you Google her name, you find out that she used to be the woman you called if you wanted to rent space or book a reception at the old provincial gallery. How this qualifies her to run the gallery on even an interim basis, I don’t know, but I can hardly wait to see this visionary at work.”
Perhaps that’s unfair. But the point here is that according to the attitude among artists in St. John’s, the Board of Directors and CEO are suffering from a lack of imagination, one that in itself is contemptuous of the public at large. One that assumes tourists want to travel to foggy and cold St. John’s to see a bunch of folk-art crap, when they could be treated to the best of what contemporary culture has to offer.
But, the point I’m trying to make by bringing up London and my thoughts therein are that treating The Rooms with the contempt with which it has been treated, first by the Provincial Government, which kept it closed for a year, and now with Laurin’s dismissal, is stunting the imagination of Newfoundlanders, a place which so far has imagined itself as backward and victimized, and been rewarded by doing so by a Kevin Spacey movie. Laurin’s purported vision to give the citizens of St. John’s the quality of culture they deserve (that is, the best) and to resist mediocre crap, is admirable, and it’s unfortunate that another Maritime art scandal has resulted in the process. But here we also seem to be dealing with the backlash of ‘the excluded’ toward the elites (who have excluded by obscurantist writing and snotty attitudes for a century now) by treating them with ‘an equal contempt’.
Let’s just say that nobody has a monopoly on the imagination, but London also illustrates that it’s important to foster the best imaginations society has to offer.
I’m tempted to say ‘get a grip’ but it seems that the only people freaking out about the potential for terrorism in Canada, and in Toronto for that matter, are the news editors at the traditional outlets. I mean, remember a week ago, under these sweltering blue skies, when talk was on how crappy the Live 8 was and how the biggest threat to Canada was Karla Homolka, that psychopathic windbag who threatened to blow and blow and blow until our whole civil society came crashing down?
And then, Thursday morning, in London England, some bombs go off. Suddenly, Canada’s provincial sense of inferiority is nowhere to be found. Suddenly, all of our insecurities about not being able to play with the big boys are gone, because ‘oh my god, we’re next!’
Now, all we need is one or more nut-jobs to render what I’m saying here obsolete fast. But let’s not be superstitious about it. Let’s not think that just because I’m saying it ain’t gonna happen here means I’m jinxing it or something else. Granted, we should be vigilant. Granted, we certainly hope it won’t happen here. But I want to say this. I don’t think it’s going to happen here.
I say this with a sense of self-confidence, me, a pipsqueak citizen. The same self-confidence that our Ministers seem to lack in order to reassure the public. The same sense of self-confidence I use whenever I drive onto the 401. Sure, I could get killed, but why today? I know what I’m doing and I have to assume the other driving along do as well.
It would seem that our leadership doesn’t know what it’s doing. Let’s go over some points.
1. Ann McLellan sucks
I think back to October 2001 when suddenly she was the Iron Lady who was going to clamp down on our civil liberties and make sure that Canada wasn’t the so called terrorist haven that CBC documentaries would make it seem to be. Now she’s saying Canadians aren’t psychologically prepared for terrorism, which is a big help. Wonderful leadership. And what, pray tell, would be evidence that we are ready? And, with our history of bloodshed, why the hell should we be?
I’ll tell you about my psychological preparation for terrorism: after Sept 11, ‘life is short’ entered my vocabulary. Further, I developed an impatience described as ‘life is too short to put up with this bullshit’. Who wants to go to work one morning unprepared to become a skydiver and think of all the time we wasted listening to know-nothings and bastards? We all deserve better than the mediocre crap we are asked to put up with, and we deserve better than a Public Safety Minister like Ms. McLellan.
Prior to 9/11, I was dealing with a bout of hypochondria. Worried about this ache and that itch, suddenly the prospect of not seeing the end of a day that began with stupid anxiety was brought to my attention on repeat and with colourful graphics and passionate voiceovers. I learned on that day that one could go at any time, and I, in my practically atheistic way, said, ‘My life is in God’s hands’. We only have so much control over our lives, and let’s focus on what we can manage, and if our fate is to die because some jerk is trying to prove a point then well, what can you do?
2. John Bull’s Eye
London England – 2000 years old, long history of violence. Mobs there used to cart heads around on the end of pikes, but we’ve forgotten that. The news keeps talking about the Blitz, and something about the IRA (remember them)? London, England, home of the British Empire, which has been condemned by every politically correct academic for the past 40 years. London, where, in the months since September 2001, we have regular reports talking of terrorist drills, broken up rings, arrests made, and incidents quashed. Home to 7.5 million people. That’s a full 1/4th of Canada’s population right there. (All of Canada = 4 Londons).
Now, I raise this to say, of all the places in the world, after New York, it makes sense for bombs to go off in London.
History of violence and terrorism on a scale of 1 to 10: 10.
History of violence and terrorism in Toronto:1
(I’ll give it a 1 since there’s at least one shooting every weekend, and I don’t think we’ve had mob violence since the 1830s.)
3. Al Qaeda is a Phantom Menace
The best explanation of what’s happened over the past 4 years I’ve encountered has been Adam Curtis’s, The Power of Nightmares. This was broadcast on CBC Newsworld last spring, and was available on the Internet. The video has been take offline, but here you find a transcript of the episode I’m talking about. Now, The Power of Nightmares is a pretty straightforward account of the rise of both fundamentalist thinking in the States (in terms of the Religious Right, and the Neo-Con hawks) and of the Mid East. And here, we are told that Al Qaeda (essentially) doesn’t really exist. The story goes that in the aftermath of the 1998 Kenyan bombings, when the United States put one of the people they caught on trial in New York, they wanted to try Bin Laden in absentia. To do this, they needed to be able to claim/prove that he was part of an organized crime ring – these laws were developed to fight the Mafia. So, they get this fellow to tell a story about something called Al Qaeda, which is Arabic for ‘the Base’. Here, I might as well quote it:
“JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, AL QAEDA During the investigation of the 1998 bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who is a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the early 90s, who has been passed around a whole series of Middle East secret services, none of whom want much to do with him, and who ends up in America and is taken on by-uh-the American government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and is given a huge amount of American taxpayers’ money at the same time. And his account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The picture that the FBI want to build up is one that will fit the existing laws that they will have to use to prosecute those responsible for the bombing. Now, those laws were drawn up to counteract organised crime: the Mafia, drugs crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation is extremely important. You have to have an organisation to get a prosecution. And you have al-Fadl and a number of other witness, a number of other sources, who are happy to feed into this. You’ve got material that, looked at in a certain way, can be seen to show this organisation’s existence. You put the two together and you get what is the first bin Laden myth – the first Al Qaeda myth. And because it’s one of the first, it’s extremely influential.”
The idea of global network of sleeper cells financed by Bin Laden is built up in the days after 9/11 by the NeoCons who want more money for the military-industrial complex. One of the main theses in The Power of Nightmares was that the core of NeoCons – Wolfowitz, Rummy, and the two Dicks (Cheney and Perle) had a long history of over-demonizing America’s enemy – whether it be USSR, or Ayatollah Khomeini (which lead to their support to Saddam Hussein in the 80s), to Saddam himself, and finally, prior to Bin Laden, Bill Clinton.
An arms race of nuclear weapons or a blow job – it was all the same to those jerks cause it got play on CNN and created an anti-Liberal culture unified by a common threat.
Al Qaeda then, would seem to be an elaborate fantasy. And perhaps this knowledge is worth spreading around. Funny though how traditional media haven’t really gotten into it.
The point I want to make here though is that when our city is marred, as it is from time to time, by hate graffiti against whatever ethnic group, CBC isn’t blaming it on an elaborate network of the Aryan Brotherhood. No, we assume it’s a bunch of punks. A bunch of local grown assholes, perhaps inspired by some underground hate-lit or vid. I’m thinking terrorism is working the same way today. Bin Laden might be the hate-pamphleteer, the author of the video Mein Kamp’s that supposedly make the rounds from mosque to mosque, attracting young romantic Islamists to training camps. But we’re dealing with a bunch of independent groups I think, local grown assholes. (And it should be pointed out that we aren’t even sure that Islamists were behind it yet).
London, apparently, had them. Does Toronto? That’s the question. If they do, then…
4. CSIS is incompetent?
John Ralston Saul’s anger toward the word ‘inevitable’ when used by economists and politicians to describe ‘globalizing forces’ over the past 30 years has sharpened me to being angry with the likes of McLellan and all these other so called experts. For them to sit there, on TV, and say, ‘oh, it’s gonna happen here …’ is an admittance of incompetence. It’s like they’re saying, ‘yeah, there are terrorist cells in Canada, we know that, and yeah, they’re probably planning something, but we can’t do anything about it.’ Are they still investigating Jadhi Singh I suppose? Going after the Raging Granies? Or, are they just covering their do-nothing asses by saying it’ll happen here in case something actually does and they were too busy eating donuts?
Basically, scare mongering isn’t going to help anyone. Further, I don’t see why Canada could be seriously considered a target for someone like Bin Laden. For impressionable young bastards from Markham …. who knows? But they’d have to build their bombs first, which would involve the procurement of materials and probably the access of certain websites. CTV and CBC would still rather tell us about the arrests of the local kiddie porn pervert than report such news. What does CSIS know? What aren’t we being told? But is it possible that in effect, there is nothing really to tell?
5. Vigilance
‘Report anything suspicious’. Right. One time I was on the Go Train and there was what I thought a suspicious package there. This was last winter or something. I have to parse this in light of all the paranoia. I think, ‘do I really want to bring the entire Go System to a complete stop just because some careless person forgot something?’ I decided to switch cars. I watched a Go employee walk right past it.
2nd story – CBC reports that VIA rail is investigating a security breach after a CBC employee boarded a train, entered the baggage area, and wasn’t checked for a ticket. I remember in 1995, riding from Moncton to Halifax, and talking with a girl who was careful to not run into the employees cause she was riding without a ticket. She made it sound bohemian and romantic. And I bring that up to say – I bet people ride VIA all the time without tickets. Perhaps this is Canada’s dirty little secret. Do you know someone who freeloaded a VIA ride?
And while we’re on the subject, I’ll bring up that I hate this type of reporter vigilantism. Remember how the Globe and Mail’s Jan Wong, in the months after 9/11, boarded a plane with what was then contraband – box cutter or the like? And then she writes about it as if things are so awful. The same woman who once spent an hour and half looking for kiddie porn in order to prove that it takes that long to find? Why aren’t these people arrested? If I was recruiting terrorists, I’d consider seducing reporters. It would seem a Press Pass is more valuable than a security clearance badge at the airport. You can get away with anything!
Reporter antics do not prove that security is lax. It might prove that these people, whose pictures often accompany their articles, or are seen on tv, are in effect ‘known’ by security. Jan Wong for example – shows up at the airport, has a knife in her purse, and is waived through because it’s known that she’s a just a reporter, and the thought is, ‘why would she do anything?’
The problem with vigilance, when talking about transportation systems, or in whatever other context, is that people are going to be preoccupied with what to them will be significant concerns. ‘I just want to get home,’ ‘I have to make this appointment’. ‘I don’t want to cause a scene…’
Do you remember the fellow in an American airport, who was seen running down an up-escalator? This was in November 2001. Anyway, because he ran down an escalator that was going up, because he was running late, he freaked out security, caused a scene, shut down the airport, and was arrested. He went to jail.
So, you shut down the subway system, inconvenience thousands including yourself, because someone forgot their umbrella, you won’t be called a hero, or congratulated for being vigilant in an era of paranoia. You’ll be vilified.
Now, I’m not saying this to discourage vigilance, or to say it doesn’t matter – I am though, simply trying to articulate what I think most of us would think when considering to hit the alarm strip. The TTC and Go Transit needs to do more to reassure us that we are allowed to do so because otherwise, ‘misuse can lead to fine or imprisonment’.
End the mixed messages and the scarmongering please. And I’ll see you on the subway.
I’ll make this short for once, because there’s not a lot to say beyond this: if you want to check out a year’s worth of Queen West shows in one weekend, make your way over to City Hall between Friday and Sunday to see all the art-stars and wannabes on display. I always find the stuff the art students are doing (who tend to be relegated to their own marginal section) to be worth checking out. Here’s the PR:
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Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition
July 8, 9, 10, 2005
Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto City Hall
Free Admission * Rain or Shine
Hours: July 8, 10am-8pm; July 9, 10am-7pm; and July 10, 10am-6pm.
Find paintings, drawings, sculptures, fibre works, jewelry, watercolours, metal works, original prints, ceramics, glass, wood works, mixed media works, and photographs by 530 artists and craftspeople!
Win a $500 Art Shopping Spree! Tickets are $5 each. Buy them at the TOAE office or at the Main Information Booth at Nathan Phillips Square during the show.
For more information: 416.408.2754 or toae@torontooutdoorart.org
img: Scott Waters, Domestic: Cardinal, 2004, oil on wallpaper
In the future, people will consult machines, which will publish ‘you are’ books. Having analyzed you inside and out, through remarkably in depth ways – you will be presented with a canon of yourself. Thus defined you will either take comfort or squirm.
Mr. Speaker, it is a real privilege for me to stand in the House at this important and significant moment in Canadian history in the ongoing evolution and development of equality rights in our country. This issue is about families and it is about equal families. When we think of families, we immediately think of love.I would like first of all to salute a group which goes by the acronym of PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. It might not seem that remarkable today that there would be an organization called Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, but many years ago when this organization came into being, not only was it difficult for a lesbian or a gay person to come out to his or her family, but it was very difficult for a family member to acknowledge to their broader community that their child was a lesbian, or a gay man. In fact, this is what precipitated the enormous feeling of loneliness which is the singlemost common sentiment that I have heard over the many years that I have been associated with the gay and lesbian community. They have a feeling of being alone with nobody understanding. In a sense they are fearful of what would happen if who they really were became public knowledge, became known to their family, to their friends, to their community.
There was justification for those fears. Far from a loving environment in the early days, certainly of my awareness of the community, the atmosphere within which gays and lesbians had to live in our country was one filled with hate. That hate was illustrated.
I remember that hate as a young person growing up in my little town in the 1950s and the 1960s. I do not know whether any of my friends in the little school I went to were lesbian or gay, but I do know a lot of insults were thrown toward any young person who was judged to have any gay-like attributes. These were hateful comments. I have learned from many of my gay friends over the years what that felt like. It was like a physical assault, and oftentimes it became a physical assault.
Madam Speaker, I should have mentioned at the beginning of my remarks that I will be splitting my time with the member for Windsor–Tecumseh.
Violence and hatred were all too common and still remain when it comes to the gay and lesbian community, the transgender community, and the transsexual community. I recall in a park in my city when a librarian was killed by a group of high school students who had gone out to beat up a gay man. They beat him to death. Sadly, this is an experience that happens all too frequently.
I want to acknowledge the work of our friend, a former member of the House, Svend Robinson, for bringing legislation forward many times in an effort to have hate crimes named for what they really were. That was finally achieved not too long ago in the House.
We are looking at trying to replace hatred with a concept of love, of affection, of the fundamental equality that underlies the whole notion of love. This takes us into new territory. It takes us into the territory of understanding and defining of relationships.
At the 25th anniversary of Pride Day in Toronto a couple of days ago a couple came up to me and asked if I remembered them. I told them that they looked familiar but that they would have to help me out. They said that they had been celebrating their 15th anniversary together and at a fundraising auction had bought a tour of the city and a dinner with Olivia and me. I had very fond memories of that couple. I asked how long ago that was. They said it had been 15 years and that they were now celebrating their 30th year together.
I know from having spent some time with these men that their family has as strong a bond of relationship and love that we would find in any family. I believe they should have the opportunity to have that relationship, that marriage, recognized on an equal par with any other loving relationship in our society.
Now we are putting that into law. I must confess, I never thought I would have the opportunity to stand in this House and actually vote for such a powerful and important proposition.
As I mentioned in my speech at second reading of this legislation, when my wife and I were married in 1988, we asked that one of our gay friends speak on our behalf and dream about the day when perhaps our lesbian and gay friends could celebrate their relationships in front of all of their friends and in front of the whole community. It truly is a privilege for me today to participate in actually helping to make that dream a reality.
This past Sunday morning one of my favourite pastors, Reverend Brent Hawkes spoke to a church service held outdoors at the 25th anniversary of the Pride Day celebrations. He imagined the day 100 years from now when a historian might be writing about the struggle for human rights over the years and talked about a story that was written about the rainbow people who used to be frightened about their identity and had to essentially keep their identity concealed, because if they allowed it to become public, they would be discriminated against and ridiculed. But they fought back, not so much out of anger, but with a spirit of joy, a spirit of respect, a spirit of pride in who they were.
In fact, Pride Day itself, and not everybody knows this, emerged as a response to a huge police raid which resulted in over 300 gay men being arrested. Very few charges were ever laid, but several of those men committed suicide as a result of the exposure of their identity at the time. Pride Day emerged as a statement by the gay community that they want to be public. They want to celebrate who they are. They will not be pushed back into the corners. They will claim their place in society. Believe me, on the streets of Toronto and in communities from one end of the country to the other, gays and lesbians, their friends, their parents and the community will be out on the streets to celebrate a group of people who used to have to hide who they were, but who can now celebrate their love and their affection for one another.
It is a magnificent transition that is under way. It is one that is also very respectful of the religious traditions that compose Canada. In fact, the legislation includes quite a number of provisions to ensure that is the case, because not all of the religious communities or even all parts of every religious community feel that the religious aspect of marriage can be expressed in quite this way. There is a provision to ensure that religious diversity, which is fundamental here in Canada, should be protected. That is, of course, vitally important to the success of this particular initiative.
I am thinking about many individuals, friends and groups who have dreamed about the day that is about to come, literally within a number of hours, when finally, lesbian and gay relationships in our communities across this country will be recognized by the whole community for what they are: equal relationships infused with the kind of love that a society frankly needs more of. It pushes away the hatred. It pushes away the discrimination. It says no to second class citizenship. It invites all of us, in all of our family structures, to share in this wonderful and beautiful country in exactly the same way, with the same rights and with the same obligations and privileges that each and every one of us has as Canadians.
Robert Fulford, reviewing the then recently published diaries of Northrup Frye, wrote:
He told his diary what he didn’t always express in print or in public. He often disliked the moral tone of the Toronto people he knew. ‘Every once in a while I get shocked by the callousness and brutality of members of my class,’ he wrote; sometimes they revealed that they thought the poor sub-human. He wasn’t impressed when Osbert Sitwell, one of the eminent Sitwells of England, came to Canada to lecture: ‘f I didn’t know him to be brilliant I’d say he was a dope.’He decided that obscenity is an ornament to language except when it becomes routine; then it approaches idiocy. He cited a colleague’s story about a First World War soldier who saw a dead mule at the bottom of a shellhole and remarked, ‘Well, that fuckin’ fucker’s fucked.’ Setting that down, Frye added, ‘What sort of person is it, incidentally, whose feelings would be spared by printing the above as ‘that —-in’ —-er’s —-ed,’ or ‘that obscene obscenity’s obscenitied’?” He had no time for prudes.
Earlier this week I posted an email interview with Matt Crookshank, who is showing with Lisa Pereira at Gallery 61 until July 3. This is the interview with her I mentioned would be upcoming. I first met Lisa two years ago, the same night that Andrew Harwood asked me to be part of the Michael Jackson show that he curated with Lex Vaughan and which got a lot of press. In almost every review – which seemed to be in every paper – Lisa’s video was mentioned, which was a surprising accomplishment for someone who at the time had told me wasn’t sure if she’d flunked out of OCAD or not. (In the end she did have to take a year off due to academic probation, and is due to graduate next year).
Lisa’s video consists of porn culled from various sources and as I describe below, a sampling of different perversions and fetishes. The most amazing thing about it for me was that I learned that it is possible for someone to fuck themselves.
Here’s her PR:
12 Signs of the Apocalypse Lisa Pereira 2005
This video provides 12 Zodialogical pearls of wisdom and is the Kama
Sutra of the 21st century (and not as boring). Like a diver finding
a filthy oyster at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant, this video
will certainly pay off in the long run (whatever that means).
And given that we have Google Ads running on this site, I think I should mention that whatever twisted links come up via the keywords in this post are to be followed at your own risk.
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Your video piece, described as a Kama Sutra for the 21st Century, really seems to be a exploration of what most people call perverse. Indeed, many people didn’t want to watch your video twice, although I question what kind of wild stuff they might have on their hardrives. Do you think that the reluctance to watch your video more than once has more to do with not wanting to experience perversion in public, amongst others, or because they were really turned off and disgusted?
With regards to why people may only watch my video once I can only suggest the following two scenarios:
1.) People don’t really watch the same thing twice (particularly video art which is often difficult enough the first time around).
2.) People feel compelled to mimic disgust in front of each other, lest the public assume that they are familiar with, or even enjoy, the particular sex acts described in the video.
I don’t think the material in the video is disgusting nor do I care whether people think I participate in the activities illustrated. They probably think I do, because a lot of people have asked me which sign I am. For the record I’m a Leo, the fisting sign.
And, I’m sure there will be some people who might be turned on by some of the footage and feel the need to have a jerk off about it later on and I think that’s swell.
The found footage in the video is stuff I downloaded off the internet. Anyone with access to a computer has access to the same images. The things I shot myself are so over-the-top and unbelievable that it’s more funny (I hope) then disgusting.
Your cynical approach comes off as an intelligent response rather than just being a wanker, which is a fine balancing act that you pull off well. I find myself amused by your work rather than annoyed. But I wonder, would you ever see yourself making bourgeois-beauty Sarah-McLachlan-like videos featuring flowers and fairies? Or are you committed to exposing the sick underbelly of society forever?
I don’t like Sarah McLachlan or the kind of lame aesthetic her music videos ape, but if I were offered some cash, would I make that kind of work? You bet.
I wouldn’t necessarily be good at it but if the price were right why not? I would take that money and put it into the stuff that I really wanted to make. Better me then some other lame director who’s gonna take that kind of shit seriously and then make some horrible ‘art film’ that I will undoubtedly have to sit through at an equally boring film festival.
And if you knew some of the jobs I’ve had, in the grand scheme of things, making bad music videos would be one of the least evil things I’ve had to do. Who knows, maybe there’s some way I could slip in a few subliminal messages. Like those Coke machines with naked ladies on them.
Anyway, people who work on Canadian music videos get paid in peanuts, probably in Sara McLachlan’s case I’d get paid in free maxis, those horrible pillow-like ones you get at the dollar store so I’d probably say no fucking way you stupid, stupid bitch.
Do you consider it sick at all?
There are sicker things out there. During the making of that video I watched a lot of shit eating. And I’m not talking about a nibble on some cute little poodle poo in Pink Flamingos, I’m talking about squatting over some girl’s mouth and emptying your bowels into her eager craw. And I couldn’t put it in the video. Not because it was revolting (which it was) but because I just couldn’t make it funny. I’m not trying to shock people and gross them out. I’m just interested in people’s sick and disgusting turn-ons.
I can see why a lot of those things might be sexy to someone even though they don’t directly turn me on. I don’t think sex shocks people anymore. Shit eating is sick but it’s kind of funny to think about. It’s unpleasant for me and maybe other people because I don’t find anything sexy about it but obviously someone does because there is no shortage of shit sex sites on the internet and elsewhere so someone’s paying for this stuff and it isn’t just perverts like me (besides, I found a all of it for free). Faking it was way funnier then actually seeing it.
You’ve made other work that seems to explore perversion – notably your vampire video featuring the liver. Why are you interested in the degradations of sex (as opposed to celebrating it or whatever else one might do?)
The vampire film was actually a cannibal film called Lesbian Cannibal (get it? she “eats” her out). There are already a lot of crappy Hollywood movies that celebrate love and sex and romance and all that stuff. Crappier still are the Hollywood movies that are supposed to be titillating and controversial but don’t discuss sex in a way that people do all the time.
Also, if one wants to jerk off, there are a variety of websites and video and magazine stores to provide you with countless hours of beat-off material. That video was about having casual sex in the midst of post-aids tension, where a single encounter could potentially kill you, but then I didn’t want to make some tragic piece about living with aids.
Matching up perversions with the signs of the zodiac was a really good idea. Was it inspired by something real? Like, where you ever involved with a nasty Pisces?
The use of the zodiac is actually based on a record called Blowfly Zodiac. For each Zodialogical sign Blowfly rearranges classic soul tracks so that they are very sexually explicit and funny. It’s a sweet little record. I don’t know anything about astrology but I liked the idea of making arbitrary connections to each sign according to some weird sex thing I was thinking about. For a mix tape of Blowfly email me at lisa@sisboombah.ca
Tim what sign are you?
I’m Aquarius
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Diamonds in the Ruff continues at Gallery 61 (61 Ossington Ave) until July 3. Gallery hours: fri 7-10pm, sat 1-6pm or by appointment.
Matt Crookshank currently has a show on right now with Lisa Pereira (interview with her to come) at Gallery 61, entitled, Diamonds in the Ruff and which runs until July 3. It is easily some of the most unique work out there at the moment, and so I sent Matt some questions.
Before we begin, here’s the PR Matt sent out last week in preparation for the last Friday’s opening:
“5 Chimera Love Paintings Matt Crookshank 2005
Chimera Love, so addicting. Love Bites! Like Pandora’s Box, the
devil in Miss Jones, these dirty slut paintings are prepared for you,
but are you prepared for them? Drenched in sin, decadence and
debauchery, they are the best kind of poison. Drink and be
imprisoned in the cage with golden bars.”
“Shade 1-3 revisited Matt Crookshank 2005
A shade is the insubstantial remains of the dead, a phantom without a
body or the power of thought. When hung together, these paintings
create a temporary window through which one can view Hades without
having to actually stay there for eternity.” One of the viewers said that the circles looked like old used condoms. When I asked you about it, you said that to you they were like pockets of energy emerging between the branes of the multiverse of String Theory. Do you think this reflects some kind of fractal of reality, as a dried condom is in a way, a pocket of (captured) energy?
And, was she right-on, considering these were the Chimera love, ‘dirty slut’ paintings? (weren’t they?)
I loved her association to dirty condoms. I’m definitely interested in skins, and membranes, and fluidity in between structures. I find all of that rather sensual, and somehow almost ‘sinful’. There’s something so decadent about tubing out entire tubes of paint onto your canvas. It’s gratuitous. And when the varnish breaks through the tubed dikes, and slides all over the canvas against my will… oh my god…
You’ve told me in the past that this style of yours, with circles and squiggles are inspired by String Theory, are these:
a) concrete representations of something abstract,
b) concrete representations of a concrete reality,
c) abstract representations of a concrete reality,
d) abstract representations of an abstract reality?
e) None of the above. My paintings are not representations of anything. They are something. Certainly there are ideas in them from String Theory, and from other sources. But they are not illustrations of String Theory. They are cohesive and total power magic spells and they are designed to effect people and create changes.
I want you to talk about the ‘failure’ stuff, and this whole thing about being disgusting. I don’t really see the paintings as particularly gross – I see an interplay between materials, but they aren’t what we’d easily call beautiful. One pocket of yellow and red reminded people of a pussy sore, as if that’s the only thing that red and yellow can suggest. What’s going into your colour choices? Are the red and yellow here not related to fire, to being a window into Hades/Hell?
It depends on how you define ‘disgusting’. I think something that is gratuitous is often disgusting. Too much of something becomes gross. Do you ever have a moment when you get too turned on maybe? Or too titillated? Too aroused? And then it all comes crashing down cause it’s too much. When there’s been too much suspense and the illusion breaks. I love that line, that moment when it goes from beauty to horror. I like to make my paintings play that line.
As far as colours being representations of fire, no. My colour choices generally just pop into my head when I look at a canvas. It just says ‘I need some red’ or whatever. My paintings aren’t representations of anything, not in the way that they’re painted anyway. And they’re also not symbolic – I loathe symbolism. So speak and say. Yuck.
My paintings are magic spells. I know that sounds sort of simple, like I’m some kind of village idiot, but it’s true.
I love abstract paintings because you can allow them to become these organic systems, and before you know it they’ve gotten away from you and taken on a life of their own. They each have their own energy, and they are meant to make people change. When I write about my paintings raising hell, or creating world peace, or starting revolution, of course that’s all tongue in cheek. I know that my paintings probably won’t do any of those things. I can’t be totally sure of it, and I certainly am thinking and dreaming rather seriously about those kinds of ideas while I paint, but I’m aware that most of the time they will fail in my more grandiose magic casting intentions.
But this general idea, that a painting can make something tangible happen, that I have seen with my own eyes. I know how paintings can change people, and how they can open minds. There is a very real energy in painting, and it translates to the viewer. You can make someone change, you can affect their mind, and you can create all kinds of effects. Right now, I might not be causing reckless debauchery and dementia through my paintings, but one day! Just you wait.
Obviously chance is playing a part of the process, so I wonder how much you try to control, and if you do any editing after the fact, in case it didn’t turn out like you hoped.
How can you edit poured varnish? It does whatever it wants. The other elements in my paintings are extremely controlled. The painted lines are details of sketches or strokes with my computer mouse. Sometimes I lay out compositions in Photoshop. I build a very strict structure, a foundation, for the varnish to flirt with. Once I lay the varnish, I’m introducing the liquid, the fuel, and the fluid that works inside the structure. It’s the contrast of these two simple things that really lets the paintings take off. I love the varnish because from then on, the paintings pretty much paint themselves. It’s not ‘my free subconscious expression’ and it’s not something I compose and control. It’s actually something entirely random. Of course I mix in whatever colours I want, but this varnish is so unpredictable, even after 5 years using it I can’t know what it will do.
Let’s talk about abstraction. What do you enjoy about it?
Abstract painting is the most difficult thing to do well. It is so easy to make terrible abstract paintings, but it is so very hard to make extremely powerful and overwhelming abstract art.
I love that abstract painting is such a degraded art form. It went from the highest of high art with abstract expressionism, to (what it seems to be now in Toronto) the most reviled and abhorred practice. Especially from the context of a straight white male. How predictable!
Of course, the rest of the world is way ahead of Toronto on this. Abstraction is so exciting right now. There is so much innovation, and it’s really able to capture and translate the complex myriad structures we now live in so effectively. In Toronto though, it seems like people are still stuck in the 90s, still so embarrassed by abstract painting.
Still, people just don’t seem to know how to deal with it. They keep looking for a way to ‘read’ it, to force a narrative. Whether that’s the tired narrative of formalism, or the cliché of pure expression. So many people seem so at a loss. It’s so much easier to look at badly drawn cartoon art, which is a blight upon Toronto right now.
When will that shit die and go away?? If I were to draw or paint cartoons, I’d become a graphic novelist. That’s something you can respect! But how can anyone respect an artist’s stoner sketches, pinned up on a wall? A narrative no deeper than loose nostalgic empathy, maybe with a bit of irony and sarcasm thrown in. Barf.
Abstract painting is fucking HARD. It challenges me. Once you’ve really allowed a painting to come to life, and it starts to tell you what do paint next, that’s when you’ve really gotten somewhere. You’re out of your own head, and you’re into some kind of new territory where you’re forced to respond and be inventive and problem-solve. I had a fantasy once of curating an abstract art show, and forcing all these conceptual artists, and cartoon drawers, and realist painters and photographers to make abstract paintings. Because it is, to my mind, so much more of a challenge than other art practices.
I know I’m sounding totally pretentious right now, but really think about it? There’s nothing else to grab a hold of. No narrative, no figure, no ground, no concept. You have to make the painting speak on its own. And I’m not talking ‘art for art’s sake’ here. I mean you have to make it really talk to people, to make them change. I’ve seen it with so many people, getting excited and turned on in front of my paintings. High is the new low.
Abstract painting is the most difficult of all art forms to perfect. It’s like poetry. Listening to most poetry is like living a nightmare. But every now and then someone is so good, that it makes you forget about every shitty bad piece of poetry you’ve ever read or heard in you life. Abstract painting is the same way. It’s terrible – 99% of it is terrible. Because it’s so HARD. So much art I see my peers in Toronto making right now, it’s so easy to produce. It’s a quick idea. A one off joke. No commitment. It can be very quirky and fun, certainly. But I don’t know how that can be fulfilling. There’s no daring, no chance, no allowing for chaos and then dealing with what comes next.
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Diamonds in the Ruff continues at Gallery 61 (61 Ossington Ave) until July 3. Gallery hours: fri 7-10pm, sat 1-6pm or by appointment
Matt is also currently showing at Solo Exhibition (Barr Gilmore’s storefront window space) at 787 Queen West. That piece is called Chimera Cesspool (of Sin) which consists of oil and varnish on glass. Solo Exhibition runs from one full moon to the next, and so that show ends on July 20 (the day they landed on the moon!)
Last night I dreamt I was in a gallery looking at particularly bad art, and there were two girls there – one was P-, and they were glowering at me; I was feeling defensive, and when we got to talking the subject came up, they acknowledging visible discomfort, I saying in return, ‘Yes you look like you’re ready to attack me,’ but then the conversation shifted as to how they were discussing my writing, and that while they liked the show, they couldn’t help but agree with my ideas, and were curious as to what I thought. Perhaps —– —– was one of these people (talked to her and P- last night at the openings) but then a curator was giving a tour of the work, saying that some of the work was based on memories of their childhoods, and I interrupted at this point to say, ‘I question whether work based on childhood isn’t in effect childish, and I’d prefer adult work for adults’. This silenced the curator. Later, she told me that she couldn’t think of a rebuttal, and I felt bad, as I’d humiliated her.
So, like I mentioned in my last posting, I was at the MOCCA opening last week. I wasn’t planning to go, really – I planned on going to the latest show at YYZ, but a friend told me about the MOCCA party where she was going so we made plans to meet there. I arrived early, after checking out the show at 401 Richmond, and then my friend showed up, but she got into interesting conversations with other people, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I wandered around introducing myself to other people for kicks (which I guess is a way to say that the art didn’t hold my attention). But I guess it never really does for very long, especially at openings, and especially at openings in the summer which also consider themselves parties. ‘Seen one, seen ’em all’ I’ve been known to say, and the thing is that’s not really unfair since artists are so invested in the idea of a series. Perhaps I’ve opened myself up to the criticism that I don’t know what I’m doing – writing about art and all – but I tend to think it’s a skill acquired from the channel surfing culture. New technologies introduce new skill sets and exploit unknown talents, n’est-ce-pas?
So, in MOCCA, taking up the main exhibition space, are a bunch of drums. Drums as sculpture, drums in videos, mechanized-robotized drums. I’m sure there’s lost here to appreciate if you like music and drums, but since I’m not passionate about either, I don’t really have anything to say. Some people like Crest, I like Colgate; this is Crest art to me. That’s all.
I suppose I should learn my lesson from my last posting and bitch about it, which would raise some ire and get everyone out to see what all the fuss is about. All I can say is that I’m still figuring out this whole art-criticism thing, which doesn’t even matter anyway since people are quite capable of making up their own minds. I guess when I started this gig I figured I’d try to weigh in with my two cents now and then, encourage people to see this and check out that, give them some ins to the scene. So, with that in mind, I’m saying: there’s a new show at MOCCA. It’s next door to a show at Edward Day which is going to have more visitors now than it would have had otherwise because I said that show was boring. Well, I find the drum show at MOCCA boring too, but for different reasons: cuz it ain’t my cup of tea is all. That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been exhibited in the first place, it’s just to say that I’m a nerd who doesn’t like the whole indie-music convergence with fine art thing, but that’s just me. It’s workin’ for everyone else. So be it.
This drum thing is called Demons stole my soul: rock n’ roll drums in contemporary art. Rock on.
The show I did appreciate at MOCCA is in the backroom, featuring Karma Clarke-Davis, Edith Dakovic, Nicholas Di Genova, Istvan Kantor, Geoffrey Pugen, Floria Sigismondi.
I like Di Genova’s pieces; I curated him into the YYZ zine last January, where he worked with that document’s newsprint to publish nice black and white drawings. Here, he’s showing large images drawn on mylar using animation ink, to give the colours a nice matte effect. I think I’m struck by his pictures because they have this relationship to Japanese animé which I spent my childhood adoring, as did many of us. Animé holds my interest because of the combination of striking rendering, unique stylization, and usually a philosophical underpinning to the story line. By tapping into these associations, Di Genova is able to produce work that holds my interest beyond my usual cursory glance.
In the same room is a video I didn’t watch by Geoffrey Pugen. Or I should say I watched it but didn’t put the headphones on to hear the soundtrack, mostly because the two available were almost always in use. Next to that is one of Istvan Kantor’s machine-sex-action videos … the point of which I always find is lost because I’m distracted by the fact that I know the people writhing around and I’m thinking ‘so-and-so has a nice body’. I think it’s all supposed to be about dehumanization, and machines, and porn, but it comes across as a fetish video of all three, with acting worse than what you usually get in a porn video. But hey, he’s famous now so who cares right? Nowadays, it’s like you’re not a real curator if you don’t take Kantor seriously, so throw him in with the kids.
Sigismondi is another one of these famous people who’s shown with the MOCCA before, when it was up in North York, and she’s got a mannequin with horn legs if I remember correctly. The show is called Hybrids, and so it makes sense under this curatorial theme of what Robert Storr would associate as grotesque. I suppose this is a polite Canadian version, extremely understated, of what he was getting at last year with his SITE Santa Fe show: artists mash things up, come and check it out how weird it all is.
Edith Dakovic has the most repellent pieces, to my Colgate mind, consisting of sphere coated with the type of silicon used to simulate skin in special effects. Little hairs here and there, and moles cover it’s healthy Caucasian surface, the illusion eliciting the reaction of it being some form of life, some deformed animal grown in the lab for organ harvesting and the usual nightmare scenario.
Karma’s video must have been between loops because I didn’t see it and don’t know what it’s about.
Ok, to summarize then: what awaits you when you cross the parking lot, currently marked by that gorgeous installation of blue tree stalks, is Edward Day on your left, who’s showing boring realist work and other stuff that didn’t catch my attention; straight-ahead in MOCCA, you’ll find a floor full of drums cast in bronze or whatever, some of them done up with robotics, along with videos and other things; in the back room at MOCCA, a show called Hybrids which is the only thing that caught my interest. There’s probably something else which I’m forgetting, but hey, I was socializing that evening, not looking for the god of the art religion.
More info: MOCCA website (which is in desperate need of redesign).
I was at the MOCCA opening the other night (more on that later) and while there checked out the Dan Hughes show at Edward Day next door. To be absolutely honest, I was looking at the paintings while in the middle of introducing myself to a girl who turned out to be a painting student at OCAD, so we talked about it from the perspective of both being familiar with the medium. At one point I said, ‘these are too 17th Century for me,’ referring to their dark colour schemes. And I bring that up only to say straight away that the paintings weren’t absorbing 100% of my attention.
I’ve recently begun to paint again after not taking it that seriously over the past few years, and I’ve been going after this New Old Mastercism that Donald Kuspit began talking about 6 years ago. Dan Hughes’s show is just down the street from Mike Bayne’s, which just closed at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery, which I wrote about here and which mentioned Kuspit’s defence of superior craft ‘enhancing sight to produce insight’.
I’m afraid that the only immediate insight I got from Dan Hughes’s show is that varnish makes paintings very shiny. (That and what follows after a couple of days reflection …). My own recent experiences with practicing the craft of painting, in relation to rendering and toward the achievements of the Old Masters is that craft alone clearly isn’t enough.
I’m reminded of one of the more famous excerpted essays I’ve encountered reading art and literary criticism, in which R.G. Collingwood states in his 1938 book, The Principles of Art, (quoting Coleridge): ‘we know a man for a poet because he makes us poets’, as Collingwood explains, ‘the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can only express it when the poet has shown them how’.
Our everyday familiarity with language is enough to help us appreciate those who can use words well, and how a well turned phrase can unlock for us understanding not available by being inarticulate (hence my loathing of jargon based literary and art writing).
We don’t seem to share such a facility with images, especially crafted ones, since most of us don’t draw and paint, although most of us do take photographs. So someone like Dan Hughes, just because he can paint like that, means he gets a pass by default into a show. It also seems to mean that those who can’t draw and paint are awestruck at first impression by his ability, so much so that the impression is one of appreciation, and if they can afford it, the seduction of their chequebooks.
Some stuff, by what it represents, will grow in value – like Mike Bayne’s, whose images of today’s everyday will appear quaint in a century and will tie that time to ours, giving them a sense of where they came from. But Hughes’s images are already boring, and I’m uncertain as to how they could grow in value. Nothing represented is worth sharing, none of the images will help the future understand its past. Skulls, self-portraits, business men on stairs … been there done that and gave away the t-shirt. I don’t write this or what follows to be mean, nor to causally disregard it simply for the clichés that they are as much as I mean it as constructive criticism with hopes that Hughes will grow as an artist and that he can put his considerable skill to better use in the future.
And here I’ll acknowledge what these images must be all about: they’re studio exercises he’s trying to offload because he doesn’t want to store them somewhere. He must be thinking, ‘might as well sell them to someone who’d like to have it in their livingroom’ which is all fine and dandy, but let’s be clear about that.
I need to point out that the main thing that makes these images uninteresting is the dark colour scheme – like I said, it’s too 17th Century, when it was fashionable for paintings to be dark. There was a reason for that then, namely, the high cost of coloured pigments against the sort of mass production of images for people’s homes – for a while there, paintings were affordable for the masses. For his own reasons, Hughes has chosen to ignore the past 150 years of paint and pigment development. And part of this criticism also fits into my pet theory of Canadian painters being united via a coincidental (aka cultural) appreciation for bright pallets – something that would seem to have lots to with our being a northern latitude country. So, if he’d used bright colours, filled these paintings with light, taken advantage of the range of affordable pigments available to early 21st Century painters – then I imagine these images transformed, amazing, worth going to see.
As it is, we can do that ourselves with Photoshop. In that sense Hughes is accidentally at the cutting edge of what’s going in our culture at large. Recognizing that the form crafted in the studio (the painting as object) is ultimately only the first version and separable from the content (the image), which can be modified, and re-edited, manipulated, etc. One day, one of these images of one of these paintings will have its levels adjusted in Photoshop before being printed for a bedroom wall. And that is what it comes down to. He, nor the gallery, nor the buyer, have the final say of what these images are supposed to look like. Since they seem to be nothing more than an exercise, you wouldn’t really be re-writing their meaning because they don’t mean anything in the first place.
And hence the image I’m using to illustrate this entry – folded and torn, it’s the reproduced image of a rather large painting, once again reproduced here and modified by my use of it that evening to exchange email address and give out the address as to where we were all going afterward. It perhaps more than anything communicates what this show is all about to me – a decoration to daily life, a nice backdrop to find some common ground with a pretty stranger.
Dan Hughes at Edward Day Gallery until June 12th
(image of Dan Hughes’s invite after a night of email exchanges and note-taking)
Ah the isms, can’t live with ’em, can’t have good arguments without them. And for the past thirty years, we’ve seen a flourishing of isms, one that could almost be said to have sprung from the fertilized soil of the World War’s dead a generation prior. To some they were flowers, to others they have been weeds.
And JRS is one who’s seen them as weeds. I’ve come to find them somewhat noxious myself, which is one of the reasons that I’ve grown fond of his thinking, and over the winter I read most of his books. It is also for that reason that I was particularly excited when I learned in March that he had a new book coming out. There was also a geeky pleasure to know that with the publication of a new text he’d be speaking in Toronto at some point, which turned out to be sooner rather than later.
JRS spoke at U of T’s MacMillan Theatre a week ago now, which I eagerly attended and like the keener I am took a seat dead centre in the third row because lectures for me are more exciting than rock concerts.
Having received a review copy of The Collapse of Globalism a week and half before, I must say that I was only able to get half way through it before seeing JRS in person. The first half of the book traces the history of the globalist ideology, which swept through the governments of the Western world over the past 30 years (which is also equivalent to my lifetime). But, even JRS conceded while presenting an overview of his arguments, ‘what could be more boring than economics’. I tried to cram last week to get ready for the talk, but found myself easily distracted by such mundane activities as mowing the lawn, because it was sunny out and I didn’t want to be stuck inside reading boring economic history, albeit written with Saul’s wonderful style. There is also the element of extreme annoyance at seeing, in the black and white of the text, at how stupid the political leadership has been, those which Saul refers to as ‘elites’ in his indiviudal way (a sort of Saul glossary is available through his 1994 book, The Doubter’s Companion).
Near the end of his talk, Saul referenced the coming democratic crisis, noting that the political energy of a critical mass of people under 40 is going into NGOs and similar enterprises, seeking influence over political decisions, and noting how that’s all they can ever hope to accomplish. (He spoke at length on this in his inaugural Lafontiane-Bladwin speech five years ago, from which I excerpted the relevant portion for my Goodreads list). But, this follows from the globalist ideology, because as he noted, what better way to drive young people away from politics than to keep telling them they don’t have power, that the whole thing is run by corporations?
That’s been the story that I grew up with. It’s also one of the reasons I find someone like Saul so refreshing, because he’s part of that generation seduced by the neo-conservative economists who call themselves neo-liberal (liberal as in ‘free trade’ etc), and yet speaks for the other side; speaks in a way that gives me hope for a better tomorrow, as soon as my generation is given the power to change things. As a traitor to the ideology of his generation, I see Saul as a potential hero to the younger ones.
He’s certainly been my intellectual hero, as he’s attacked those who’ve who constructed another an ism to be a prism: the prism of economics to explain the rainbow variety of the world’s reality. Of course, it should be obvious of how much of this is nonsense. But we’ve lived under this reality because the political leadership essentially through up their hands and said, ‘it’s inevitable, we can’t do anything about it’.
Saul has particular loathing for that word, ‘inevitable’. It’s background was a little mysterious to me when I first heard him speak 7 years ago. He’s continually bitched in his books at how the political leadership was arguing that globalization was inevitable, and there was nothing they could do except jump on the bandwagon. He explained where this came from: the apparent root of this loathing which has spurned him on to write all these books over the past while.
While he was in Paris in the early 70s (during the time I presume in which he was working on his PHD thesis on the modernization of France and basking in his own hero-worship of De Gaulle) the then president of the country, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came on television to announce (and I paraphrase Saul’s paraphrase here): ‘thank you very much for electing me, you’re all very smart to have done so since I know everything, and I’ve studied the problem, and concluded there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It’s worth quoting the relevant passage from the book:
“Giscard came to power in the midst of those seminal crises of oil, inflation, unemployment, and no growth. He counterattacked as a technocrat could and made no impact … Giscard became bewildered. Discouraged.
“Then one night he appeared on television to address the people. He told them that great global forces were at work. These were new forces. Forces of inevitability. Forces of economic interdependence. There was little a national government could do. He was powerless.
“This historic appearance was probably the original declaration of Globalization as a freestanding force escaping controls of all men. It was also the invention of the new leader: the manager as castrato. This approach created quite a fashion among leaders at all levels. The easy answer to the most difficult problems was increasingly to lament publicly that you were powerless. Impotent. That your large budgets, your public structures, the talents and determination of your population could make little difference. These were not problems to be solved. These were manifestations of the global reality.”
Here seems to be the roots of his argument against technocratic experts and impotent political leadership and throwing one’s hands up in the face of inevitability. The crisis was an economic one, simply a lack of imaginative thinking. Saul argued in the Unconscious Civilisation that since politicians had given up leadership in favour of management, all they could ever do is manage, they didn’t have what it takes to lead society with creative solutions. I guess this is where I got my fire burning toward civic engagement, and the lingering bitterness I have toward the artworld in which I’m immersed: because if artists are the ones society trains to be creative, they’re wasting everyone’s time with these installations.
Not that I’m advocating all artists go into politics (remembering the Hitler example, I don’t think that’s such a good idea for the most part) but he argued last week that we’re in a vacuum now. Since 9/11, the castrated politicians suddenly realise they have balls and are pulling the strings, but they come from a generation who went into politics with the understanding that they would be making concessions to corporations. Now that the situation has reversed itself, and corporations are showing no respect for community infrastructure, the governments don’t really know what to do. Hence, Ottawa for past six months.
I see that whole circus as the chickens coming home to roost: the consequences of what he spoke about in his Massey Lectures ten years ago. At the same time, he’s married to the head of the government, so the chicanerie doesn’t seem so bad, since Mom and Pop have good heads on their shoulders even though they aren’t really supposed to have any influence. (I have faith that everything will turn out fine because Saul has the ear of the GG).
Now I have to bring something up which bothered me about his argument,something he opened himself up to. It’s a case of illogic, for he stated that one can recognize an idealogue by how much they won’t even admit to potentially being wrong; to the idealogue, what they believe is simply ‘true’. This got some laughter from the audience, but from then on, I wanted him to address the ‘truth’ of his arguments. He’s got it pretty good right – married to the Governor General; and he gets to write books destined to be bestsellers, he gets to work out the thoughts via lectures delivered on the ribbon-cutting itinerary, and he draws a sell-out crowd of the city’s thoughtful citizens. He gets to preach to a choir, and those unlike myself who haven’t reached the level of the sychophantic I imagine are at least impressed by His Excellent resumé.
Which is all to say that JRS is enabled in promoting his own ideology. His own ism. This one is older than most, being the one called humanism. As I see myself most influenced by those set of ideas, and operating within that history myself, it follows that Saul’s ism arm me for great arguments, and are breath of fresh air in the sickly academic atmosphere of bullshit that I’ve associated in.
I first saw Saul speak at Kings College in Halifax in 1998, and I found it very influential. It’s perhaps one the reasons I’m writing this now, on a blog I mean, since the way he disparaged the elites then as ‘not doing their job’ (in the earlier books he speaks of Canada’s elites as being the laziest in the world) prompted me to believe in the power of the public intellectual. That ideas and art and all this stuff that I was studying at the time belonged to everybody, and that it was part of a civic duty to criticize bad ideas as much as it was a duty to vote and follow politics because it’s there that decisions are made that affect our lives.
His relentlessly fair approach as well, as mocking what is foolish, and conceding his own defects now and then, is one of the reasons I find his writing extraordinary and highly influential. The belief is that we’re all in this together. We all want what’s best. There are many forces of divisiveness that we need to overcome. Perhaps his basic argument is ‘pay attention’. In that way you become conscious, and can decide for yourself. That’s the essence of a democracy, people deciding their own future, rather than giving up in the face of inevitability. That way, we emerge from being an Unconscious Civilisation.
You have the choice to read this book or not. You have the choice to buy it in a small bookshop or in a Chapters. Of course you can see that I’ll recommend that you do, since I’m a fan an all. But I can say that a knowledge of the history of this ideology from his perspective is quiet valuable, and that Saul’s work as a whole functions in the ways that education is supposed to: it empowers you in your own choice making. It helps you become a better citizen, and by becoming a better citizen, the world becomes a better place. As for the lecture – as I type this, I have TVO’s Big Ideas on in the living room, and I have a feeling this lecture will be broadcast on Big Ideas sometime in the coming months, so you’ll have the chance to see it for yourselves.
You’ll see how he began the talk by telling us of how on May 19th, the City Council of Burlington rejected an application from Wal-Mart to build a centre there, even after all the experts (the evil technocrats of Saul’s cosmology) said it would be a good thing. Here, the ‘common’ men and women of the council said something to the effect that Wal-Mart may know how to lower prices but they know nothing of fostering communities. And here is Saul’s story over the past decade’s happy ending: the collapse of an ideology of markets, when the common citizens take back the power their ancestors won from aristocrats centuries ago, to be able to say no thanks.
Pierre Trudeau (1919.10.18 – 2000.09.28)
Canada’s greatest Prime Minister who began his political activity advising the abestos miners of their rights during the corrupt Duplesis regime, who went on to be a socratic gadfly toward the stulifying Duplesis status quo, and who became Prime Minister almost by accident. In his last term he insisted the country adopt a constition and bill of rights suitable for the contempoary era, and he travelled to the capitals of the world urging nuclear disarmement.
Jean Vanier (1928.09.10 – )
founded the Arches centres, which provide care for the disabled throughout Europe and North America
Charles Taylor (1931.11.05 – )
philosopher who has contributed to thoughts on authenticity and morality
David Suzuki (1936.03.24 – )
trained as a genetist, he’s used his position as a science broadcaster on the CBC to advocate for environmental responsilbilty
Louise Arbour (1947.02.10 – )
lawyer who served at on the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, the Supreme Court of Canada, and now is the UN Commionsner for Human Rights
Micheal Ignatieff (1947 – )
leading thinker about human rights and of the responsible uses of political power
John Ralston Saul (1947.06.19 – )
philosopher who argues against the downsides of the corporate and managerial mentality
Steven Pinker (1954.09.18 – )
Psychologist and cognitive scientist making contributions to a materialist understanding of the human mind, and able to communicate these achievements to a broad audience
James Gosling (1956.05.19 – )
programmer who developed the Java programming language which has been used on NASA probes
Malcolm Gladwell (1963 – )
writes articles for the New Yorker magazines which documents the history of popular culture.
Mark Kingwell (1963 – )
philosopher who is active in the media and who is able to communicate the complexity behind the gray areas of today’s issues
Rasmus Lerdorf (1968.11.22 – )
programmer who created the PHP scripting engine which is used throughout the internet for dynamic websites and database interfacing
Naomi Klein (1970 – )
reporter and activist for worker’s rights and for limiting corporate power
Cory Doctorow (1971.07.17 – )
novelist and activist for sensible copyright reform
Craig Kielburger (1983 – )
activist against the use of child labour in developing areas
“Perhaps the original flaw of Globalization lies in its overstatement of the success of 19th Century free trade, along with an overstatement of the determinism of technology and the superiority of rational management systems. The certainty of all this inevitable change has distracted us from just how slow civilizations move. The recent genocide in the Congo reminds us that they – and we – are still dealing with King Leopold’s violent, genocidal interference a century ago. Britain is still digesting its loss of world leadership. China still thinks and feels like the Middle Kingdom – the centre of the world. Canada, now the third-oldest continuos democracy in the world and the second-oldest continuos federation, is still emotionally and existentially hampered by its colonial insecurity; just as Australia remains confused by the tension between its European cultural origins, its Aboriginal reality and its Asian geography; just as German youth born forty years after the end of Nazism still struggle with the idea of who they could possibly be. Algerians are still attempting to reconstitute themselves after the loss of their great and appropriate leader, Abd-el-Kader, in 1848; and Americans are still scarred and hampered by the implications of their slave-dependent social and economic origins. The list is endless.”
John Ralston Saul’s, The Collapse of Globalism arrived today. Review to follow, after I’m done reading it.
This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance caveat lector.
So why review it in the first place? Because I like that word – ‘re-view’. Because you missed it, and I was there, I can try to fill you in, paint a picture enabling you to ‘re-view’ it.
Of course, this reminds me of the presentation by Ellen Anderson who pointed out that the word ‘audience’ come from the same root as ‘auditory’ and how in Cervantes’s 17th Century, people talked about going to ‘hear a play’ while we say, we’re going to ‘see a movie’. The centuries then, divide themselves between listeners and spectators, and it makes me want to read Guy Dabord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle‘ which I haven’t done yet, but at least I’ll be able to tell people I was prompted to read it, and follow that curlicue of ideas after attending the Don Quixote Symposium in May 2005. So, what I’m saying here is – it wasn’t a wasted night, even if I was bored and didn’t stay for the whole thing. I did learn some things, and it caused me to have some thoughts, I feel they’re worth sharing.
Held at the Munk Centre last Wednesday evening, I show up near 6, when it’s advertised to start. I find everyone in the reception eating the usual hore-d’oeuvres. Did I miss it? Usually the grazing crowd follows the speeches. So, already I feel like they’re wasting my time, but whatever. Then the speeches begin with the usual…. I’m sorry, but something needs to be done about these introductions. Every recent lecture I’ve attended at universities in Toronto have been preceded by painfully long sycophantic introductions. It should become vogue for them to be short and humble, and free of the idea that we’ve been blessed by the presence of this important person. In this case, the important person wasn’t even alive – more words were said in the memory of a dead professor than the translator of the book they were selling in the foyer, the real guest of honour.
Mr. Professor’s name was Geoffrey Stag and he died last November. According to the dates give, he would have been 90 so it’s not like his death was tragic or anything. He had is run and shuffled off his mortal coil, but prior to that he’d retired in 1976, and taught Cervantes while he was at U of T. Not to seem callous but I don’t care. I doubt anyone cared, except of course for his daughter, who we were informed, was present. My point is I didn’t give up my evening for a memorial service for someone who’d worked in British Intelligence during World War II and then decided to come to the colonies to live out his life and his career. No disrespect intended, but I came for symposium on Don Quixote, which was published 400 years ago, a time span of which reminds us that our times here are petty, as are the works of those who spend their lives commenting on the achievements of others. I’ll grant the memorial aspect the respect that it deserves – which is small – but it also has a whiff of the celebrity about it, as if the beloved prof’s achievements were somehow on par with that of Cervantes’s (a point none would admit to, including the eulogizer Mr. Rupp, but a point that I feel stands given that actions speak louder than words).
Don Quixote has recently been translated by Edith Grossman who began the talks speaking about what it means to be a translator. Now, having French as a second language has meant that I’ve tried my hand at translation from time to time. At the moment I should be working on something I’m prepping for my reading group, but I’m intimidated by the two last chapters I need to get finished. So, I was surprised to find that what she spoke about resonated with me. She noted that being a translator is, by definition, self-effacing – one is supposed to disappear behind the intentions of the first author. She also noted that translation is not merely matching up words in a 1 to 1 relationship; doing so is a mark of a failed translator, and given the presence on the web of translation engines such as Babeflish, we are very much aware of what she’s talking about. She reminded us that translation is collaboration. She quoted Borges, who told his translator, ‘write what I intended to write, rather than what I wrote’. My own experience shows this to be a very challenging game, since you have to be careful about what you assume they meant: you don’t want to rewrite the book with your improvements, but also a translation is very much a version of an account, which is why her version competes for shelf space with John Rutherford’s.
The presentations, from my perspective at the back, were distracted by the CBC cinematographer, running about trying to get his angles so they can be edited together later for something. At the time I figured it’d be some 30 second clip on the 11 o’clock news, but as I type this maybe it’ll be for some Evan Solomon show on Newsworld.
Edith Grossman spoke first, followed by Ellen Anderson who spoke of Don Quixote’s relationship to 17th Century theatre, which seemed to imply that the novel came out of Cervantes work as a playwright. It’s narration and multitude of mini-stories the type of thing you’d get if you tried to describe a week of seeing plays to a gathering of friends at the pub. Because, and this didn’t come up, but it’s relevant, we should remember that literature in the centuries preceding our own was not only something read aloud to oneself, but also, read to the crowds who hadn’t learned to read.
Anderson was followed by Rachel Schmidt, who had a Power Point slide show, as her topic was on the ‘adventure of the visual image’, talking about how artists have illustrated Quixote over the centuries. There were a couple of things here worth noting: for one, slide shows are what make lectures fun, and I don’t have a problem with people using Power Point, and I understand that some people are still figuring out how to use the program seamlessly.
But, and this is the second thing, what drives me nuts about PP presentations is the shit design of the slides. There are like, how many different fonts on the average system? Please please please do not use Times New Roman. It is the most boring and visually banal font, its status as the default font means that its use shows a complete lack of imagination, a sense that you don’t care about the aesthetics of your presentation, that you think you can just give us the bare minimum and we’re so out of it that we won’t notice. Look, design is easy, just make it look like what you’re used to seeing everyday. That’s pretty much all there is to successful amateur design – make it look like a junkmail flyer. When’s the last time you saw a junkmail flyer that used a serif font? You know what I mean by serifs don’t you?
So besides the fact that I’m grumpy because I’ve been having a rough couple of months, I just feel the need to vent a little because it’s so systemic. You have this considered presentation on artists such as Doré, Dali, Goya, and Picasso who’ve illustrated scenes from Don Quixote, but you have this slide show which is aggravating to look at.
She connected a scene that Goya illustrated with his more famous Sleep of Reason image, but then got into the speculative diagnosis of trying to tell us that Goya encoded all this stuff into the Quixote engraving. She speculated that the fact the he drew the Quixote’s sword resting as if it were resting against the arm of a chair, an arm which isn’t there, had something to do with Quixote’s fevered fantasies, rather than what I would say, is because Goya saw no reason to be that detailed, and that the presence of the chair’s arm would distract from the overall composition. Basically, that the chair’s arm would have been graphically superfluous. Goya’s sketchy style with engravings is one of the reasons they’re so marvelous, because engraving isn’t something you’d think lends itself to sketchiness. And with sketches, you just want to summarize and hint, let the mind of the viewer fill in the missing details, work with illusions rather than meticulous detail.
As someone whose dashed off a couple of drawings now and then, I think I know what I’m talking about here, and I can tell you that back when I was in university, one of my friends referenced one of my drawings in a paper. It happens, right, this stuff is out there, and it provides an interpretive angle, so your work gets referenced in that way. I didn’t read what he actually wrote, but from what he told me it was clear that he’d used my image as a sort of inspiration toward these new ideas, based around the formula, “it’s like…”. And I tell you this because I don’t want anyone out there thinking that Goya actually intended what Ms. Schimdt told us. Sure, you can read the image that way, but I doubt that’s what Goya had in mind. Which doesn’t invalidate either – her argument or his image – but I wish the speculative and metaphorical aspects of interpretation where far more obvious rather than being presented as a great discovery by someone clever, swept up in the current fashion of seeing everything as a riddle. The world of texts and images are not Fermat theorems.
Ok, so that out of the way, I’ll say that she began her talk around the scene in the book where Don Quixote encounters monks carrying some paintings, and she talked about what those paintings meant in the context of the post-Protestant Reformation of Catholic Europe, elucidating the context that would have been familiar to the first readers. But I wasn’t that interested so that’s all I can say.
She was followed by Stephen Rupp, who finally took the podium as more than moderator, to talk on ‘having fun with the classics, Cervantes and Virgil’. He began by reiterating something that Grossman has raised, that Renaissance culture depended on translations, and began to talk about how the epic traditionally had always been written as poems. And then my mind began to wander. I was so dissatisfied with his academic puffery I’d zoned out to think about other things.
My notes from the event include the self-admonition, ‘be nice, be fair,’ because I don’t want Mr. Rupp to read this and feel insulted or humiliated. But at the same time, it’d be dishonest of me to bullshit my way through the part where I stopped paying attention. And that’s how I reacted, I was bored, and that seems worth telling as a critique of the evening’s effectiveness. Somewhere in between our experiences – his ebullient enthusiasm for the subject, combined with his feelings of self-confidence, his enjoyment of the day and of being the dean of his department – somewhere, in the space between the front of the room, and the back, where I shifted uncomfortably with my bum falling asleep, our minds clashed in peep of fireworks invisible and unheard, snowing boredom on the gray heads below.
He could not know of my recent extreme dissatisfaction with the ivory tower, which despite all critiques and attempts at humiliation – that is, to render humble – continues to be an ivory tower, a shelter in which people can nurture a sense of their self-importance, bask in their sense of celebrity and in the rapt attention of the naïve students jumping into crippling debt to sit there doodling, not to mention their comfortable salaries enabling them to indulge in luxury goods, while the rest of us contemplate going on welfare because we can’t find work in our fields.
No, in the face of such bias, there’s nothing he really could have done except maybe be as self-effacing as the whole task of translation demands. Because, in the end, isn’t this all a form of translation? Isn’t every educational enterprise about making something understandable, taking the subject to be learnt and expressing it in a language that can be grasped by the audience? But I’m not saying his (or any of the other’s) language was inaccessible – no, that was fine. I’m just annoyed by the showmanship.
But that’s not what I was thinking about during Rupp’s entertaining presentation, since other people in the audience seemed to enjoy it. I was thinking about how I’d like to have a pint at The Green Room and wondering if my friend would be willing to bike up to Bloor to join me. In the end she wasn’t up to it. Nevertheless I skipped the roundtable discussion that followed the break, since I was so bored I felt I’d just be torturing myself to stay, and I walked down Beverly St enjoying the evening of the early summer. As I walked, I did not have Don Quixote on my mind, because I’d simply been visiting a subject which so far hasn’t been of much interest.
So all in all, the event was cool but I wasn’t the ideal audience, my mind easily distracted by not having a grounding in fascination with the subject and my distaste for academic self-importance at the expense of what I consider to be something real and human. This review suffers from those biases and the fact that I didn’t even stay for the whole thing. I want to summarize by saying: if, like me, you were merely curious, you didn’t miss much. If, on the other hand, you are obsessed by Don Quixote, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to give you a better report.
I posted a couple of things to blogTo this week: an email interview conducted with Mike Bayne, whose show opens tonight at Katherine Mulherin, and a review of the Don Quixote Symposium held last Wednesday evening at the U of T’s Munk Centre.
Now that winter is but a memory for another few months, it’s safe to exhibit its images I suppose, without the groan of ennui that sets in come March. Opening at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery on Friday is a show by Mike Bayne, the PR for which reads:
“Mike Bayne’s paintings are an exercise in photo-realism. His works are painted in the genre associated with the seventeenth century Dutch school of painting. His work is a study in the effects of natural versus artificial light, and an attempt to convey a sense of human absence and isolation. Mostly, though, the paintings address the banal or commonplace objects and spaces of everyday life, and demonstrate how under close examination they are transformed. His most recent work depicts an isolated Canadian winter landscape.”
I first encountered Mike Bayne’s work with the show he had last year at Mulherin’s, consisting of interior scenes mostly of the kitchen from what I remember. A few months later, I saw a piece, a winter scene, which quite literally blew my mind. I gasped thinking I was looking at a Vermeer, which is understandable since Bayne is consciously trying to work that way. At the time, I thought of an article I first read a couple of years ago, written by a British curator (Julian Spalding) who, while coming across as a stodgy old conservative, nevertheless articulated the ‘anti-post-modernism’ backlash that began to appear in online 2003, which I understand to be a way for this decade to define itself against the fashions of yesteryear, yesterdecade, and yestercentury. In the article, he stated:
“Looking at a great work of art makes one feel more fully aware of one’s thoughts yet no longer wearied by them, more exposed to one’s emotions yet no longer drained by them, more integrated, more composed – more, in a word, conscious. It is the light of consciousness that great works ignite in our minds. ”
Or, as Donald Kuspit wrote in 1999, bemoaning the tired old avant-garde (a term, we should remember, that comes from the era of World War I), and the rise of the ‘New Old Materism’:
“The attempt to create beauty as perfectly as possible has led these artists to emphasize craft — not at the expense of vision, but as its instrument. Sol LeWitt once wrote that “When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art,” but the New Old Masterism makes it clear that one can never learn one’s craft too well, and the result of doing so is not slick but uncanny. For superior craft intensifies sight so that it becomes insight, which is what occurs in highly crafted Old Master art.”
Seeing Bayne’s little painting that time ignited my mind in a way that made me understand what Spalding was talking about. Further, the intensification of sight toward insight seemed applicable as well. So I’m looking forward to this new show,am fan of Bayne’s work, and as someone who dabbles with paint myself now and then, I emailed him regarding for interview, conducted via email. The questions and answers are below.
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First of all – some background. Where are you from?
I was born and grew up in Ottawa, lived in Kingston for a few years and have lived in Toronto for the past year.
At the time of your last show at Katherine Mulherin’s, you were doing your MFA at Concordia so I’m curious as to whether you are still there and where you did your undergrad. And that leads into – plans for the future? Do you intend to teach? Do you think you can make a living selling your work?
I’m not in Montreal and I never really lived there. I commuted from Kingston, where I did my undergrad at Queen’s, to Montreal for the three years of my MFA. In terms of teaching, I would like to but have not received an offer from anyone. As to whether I can make a living from selling my work I would like to think it is possible though I have been repeatedly told that I have to do bigger paintings and more of them if I want this to be possible.
I’m curious as well as to how you approach painting – have you ever gotten caught up in ideological struggles with people who think painting is lame, or generally have you had a very supportive environment? I ask this in a sense because your work is self-consciously reflective of the Old Masters, so have you spent years dealing with the ‘why bother’ question, and in particular, ‘why not take a photograph?’ Why, in the end, have you chosen painting?
I have met people who say painting is dead and the future is audio or installation or digital or whatever but I disagree. I don’t think painting or any medium for that matter should be dominant over any of the others. I think there is room for a plurality of mediums that can coexist and be weighted equally. Otherwise, though, I have generally been exposed to a pretty supportive environment even if the profs. or other students weren’t working in the same style or medium as myself.
As to why I don’t just take a photograph, I guess I could, it’s just that I enjoy painting, and I enjoy painting from photographs specifically. Whether the end result is better than the original photo or even worthwhile, I’m undecided. On the one hand, I feel justified in that I’m continuing a tradition of painters using cameras dating back at least to the fifteenth century and artists like Vermeer and currently practiced by artists as diverse as Richter, Close, Saville, Paul Fenniak, Rod Penner, as well as a number of others. On the other hand, I think anyone who spends eight to ten hours a day, alone, staring at a one inch by one inch square area and trying to reproduce it using vegetable oil and ground pigment would seriously question what they are doing with their life.
Do you work in any other media?
No. I did the obligatory print making, sculpture and experiments in painting required during undergrad but have never really been interested in practicing anything other than oil painting since I started using the medium at around sixteen or seventeen years of age.
What is your method? You obviously work from photographs. Projection, transfer, square-up or freehand? What’s your smallest brush size, what’s your largest? How long do you work on a painting?
First, I have my negatives blown up to eight by twelve inches. I then create a grid on a piece of mylar and lay it over the photo. I trace an identical grid on a primed piece of masonite and then draw, in graphite, the information in every square of the mylar grid in the grid on the masonite. I then remove the mylar grid from the photo and ‘block in’ the drawing on the masonite in thin washes of diluted oil paint. Once that is dry (one day), I begin the ‘over painting’. The paint is mixed thickly in this stage, using little or no medium and applied in successive layers once each underlayer has dried. There may be as little as one layer or as many as nine or ten in any one area. This entire process can take between four to six weeks and does not include time spent researching materials or artists or taking photos.
As for my materials, I use nine tubes of Stevenson’s oil paint, ‘OO’ Galleria short handle round brushs, ‘3/8’ Raphael short handle rounds, and my medium is a mixture of two thirds linseed oil, one third mineral spirits and several drops of cobalt siccative. I keep all of these materials in glass bottles and jars for longevity. As a support I use 1/8 of an inch masonite boards primed on both sides at least four times and sanded between layers with a fine sand paper.
People often ask whether I use projection or whether I print the image right onto the support and paint over it and I always tell them I never have. Although I’m not against the idea of artists working this way, I just find the grid system works well for me.
What is your relation to your subject matter? I’m tempted to take photos of my kitchen and try to paint them as you do, simply for the exercise. (I recently tried meditation for it’s relaxation benefits but have found spending time drawing to be just as good – since it seems to be all about concentrating and focus on one thing in order to give the rest of your mind a rest). I wonder if you approach the meticulousness of your paintings in the same way – that it doesn’t really matter what you paint, as long as you’re painting something, and the attention to detail must be mediatative. I read on the Galerie de Bellefeuille website about how there’s a study of natural and artificial light happening, the transformation of everyday objects, and a study of empty space … and how your most recent work at the time involved the sadness of winter. Given that the Old Masters had a neo-platonic relationship to the sun and light, does any of this enter into your work? Is your study of the past limited to the techniques or are you interested in their philosophies as well?
Firstly, I have never really experimented with meditation though from what I have heard I think the process of painting as I do could be said to be ‘meditative’ in a way. To answer, the second part of your question, you are right, it doesn’t really matter what I am painting, in one sense, and I choose as subject matter what is readily available. That being said there is a lot that is readily available that I choose not to paint. Why I choose one subject over another I’m not quite sure. It could be the lighting at that particular moment, the way objects or buildings are arranged, the combinations of colours, the general mood the scene or objects evoke or my mood at the time I decide to paint what I do. To answer the last part of your question, I wouldn’t say I’m particularly influenced by the philosophies of the old masters in the sense that I think their perspective of light would have had specific religious connotations. I have a naturalistic perspective of the light depicted in my paintings. It doesn’t represent the light of God to me personally though I wouldn’t object if someone felt that way about it. On the other hand though, I think we as a species are attracted to light on some fundamental level in the same way other biological entities are and which I’m not really capable of explaining.
Mike Bayne’s show opens Friday, May 13 7-10pm at Katherine Mulherin Gallery, 1086 Queen West. Photo from the gallery website.
Thursday 15 April 2004
Christian Boltanski walks along the street, waiting and watching for the streetcar, which has failed to arrive. Caught in the backward glances every couple of minutes, he fails to notice Leanna, who walks out of the corner store, having just purchased bubble gum and a bottle of water. He walks into her, and after the shuffling has completed itself, they both engage in apologies. Then he asks, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ and she replies, ‘I don’t think so.’ He squints and turns and walks away. The streetcar has still not come. The buildings frame a scene consisting almost solely of headlights.
Some guy walked into me today, she says, when she tells him about it later. He in turn tells her of the time a woman in an electric wheelchair ran over his foot. ‘I was waiting for the streetcar, ‘ he says, ‘and it was cold, I had my hood up, so I had no peripheral vision and I was reading the newspapers in the boxes, when suddenly I feel this pressure on my foot. The woman mumbles ‘shume’ and I look down to see that my right foot is pinned under her wheel. I can’t budge. I say, ‘Can you back up, my foot is stuck’. She complies. She takes off, and I’m left with a sore foot. I figured I’d at least have a bruise but I didn’t.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t lose any toes,’ she says.
Kelly Mark is everywhere right now – at YYZ, in the news because of the Glow House, and as well, she has a show on at Wynick Tuck. Last night I dreamt that I was in Wynick Tuck noticing that none of the Letraset drawings had sold, as if they were too new, too avant-garde (such a discredited idea anyway) but now as I find the memory was nothing more than a dream, it doesn’t seem important enough to fact check to see if any have. I didn’t notice the other day when I was in.
Although in my dream, it seemed a shame, because they are quite good. Looking at them I thought of Marcel Duchamp’s machinery in the Large Glass, mostly because I recently found this great website that demystifies Duchamp’s work, and last weekend I found this other website that offers animated graphics helping to explain biochemistry. The conversion of ADP into ATP, the basic molecule of cellular energy, reminded me of the animated Large Glass. My immidiate impression was that computers are so wonderful, allowing us to animate what Duchamp envisioned, and allowing us to see what our cells are doing everyday, processes that have been difficult to imagine before.
Kelly Mark’s work using Letraset seems to represent a dynamic dance and swirl of letters, moving across page and frame to frame. While the individual pieces can stand alone, they are arranged as polyptychs and the line around which the marks are organized flow from one panel to the other. There is a dynamic machinery here, and the fontography by its black and white and serifed nature reminds me of the early century’s dynamic steam machines, which inspired Duchamp to abandon paintings of traditional subject matter in favor of engineered renderings of choclate-grinders and the hormonal process of love as if mediated by particles of malic-molded matter.
In addition to these drawings, Mark, who perhaps is punning on her name with all this, has attempted to extend the idea of drawing by taking wooden forms of the usual pottery – vases, jugs, plates, etc, and covered them with graphite, giving them the nice dark gray sheen we’re familiar with from bored schoolday scribbling. As someone who likes to fool around with a pencil now and then, I couldn’t help but wonder if she just got some raw graphite at the store and used that, or if she laboriously went at the forms with pencils. Given the nature of Conceptual practice which tends to emphasize the execution of patience rather than skill, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark had used pencils. But again, such a detail seems minor to the finished product.
Given that contemporary pencils are a form of ceramic – the lead of pencils usually something like carbon mixed with a clay, these sculptures aren’t that far fetched … complimenting the traditional form which is made pure from clay, and replacing it with the veneer – in this case, the clay mixed with carbon and preserved with a matte varnish so that you can handle the works without dealing with smudging. Since the mid-19th Century invention of electroplating, which enabled the alchemistic goal of turning base metals into gold, there has been a long history now of coating crap with a sheen of special elements; Mark has extended this by coating a form that has lent itself to admiration with an element that has also lent itself to admiration when it falls together on a page into the light and shade of a scene, reversing the usual properties by using a veneer of ceramic on our other most malleable material, wood.
Kelly’s show at YYZ is on down the hall from Wynick Tuck. As a member of YYZ’s board of directors, I don’t feel like I should review it. Although I once reviewed a show there last January, I’ve decided that I won’t anymore. But I bring it up because of the odd coincidence of titles – Mark’s show at YYZ is called horror/suspense/romance/porn/kung-fu and consists of the recorded glow from the television which had been playing films of those genres. The show opened on April 8th, a Friday, and the next Wednesday, on April 13th, the latest show at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) opened with the title Horror, Science Fiction, Porn.
‘Tis the season of words it seems. For some reason the zeitgeist in our city has organized the curatorial and artistic minds into a season of alphabets. Mark’s letraset drawings tease out the inherent visual geometries of what we’ve taken for granted since we learned how to spell – that we manage to communicate, share thoughts, break hearts and win them, through designed lines.
A personal aside now – ’tis also the season of graduation, and the show at the AGYU reminded me of my own graduating April, after a rather lazy semester when I pretty much cruised to the last day … such was the nature of the school. But I’d signed up for an intro to video course for my last semester, because the previous summer I’d read Bill Viola’s book and it interested me in the medium that was everywhere but which I’d never before taken much formal interest in, focused as I was on drawing and painting.
In addition, I had a hard time with stories throughout school. I always have a case of writer’s block when I have to invent a narrative. So for my last project, for this Intro to Video class, I was stuck. But, as Charlie Kaufman knows well, an old trick is to use the present condition if you can’t make one up; so I ended up making a video on my writer’s block.
But what Viola had impressed on me was that the invention of film and video had been a sort of miracle which we long ago grew used to, forgetting that for all of time previous, that immense well of forgetting and flash, images had been static. As someone who went to school to learn painting, I had been interested in those static images, in that long history of capturing milliseconds of the universe in shapes. Television and film fools us into thinking we have peepholes into other rooms, other places, other times, all due to an optical and conceptual illusion.
My reawakened interest then was in the animated image and it gave me a new appreciation for the silent film. So my film was silent, relying on the animated image, and the narration provided by text.
Ok – so lets get back to alphabetics. I remember when David Carson was the hottest thing; Raygun seemed the coolest, most innovative magazine going in the mid-90s, at the time that I was self-consciously a student of all things cultural. Raygun sort of coincided with my first studies in Heidegger, and what was really fetching about Raygun’s ‘anti-design’ was its strained, blurred, hard to read text. Because of that, you paid much more attention to it. The seemlessness of the interface was interrupted, and you became conscious of text as a visual element.
William Gibson’s preface in the Raygun book, Out of Control (1997), pointed out that learning to read is something we spend a lot of time doing. We have to learn to use this technology over years, so that eventually it becomes something you can do unconsciously, at a glance, so much so that you can’t help but understand what the alphabet-symbols mean when printed across the chest or the ass of some girl, the mixed messages of reproductive genetics and advanced civilization combined in some petty advert for one’s alma matter or allegiance to social stereotype. Text becomes as easy to process as speech after a while, and we see past the geometry of the marks that make it up.
Which brings me to the second thing about text that’s worth mentioning – everytime I get into a conversation about how I’m an artist, the person I’m talking with usually dismiss their own attempts with, ‘oh, I can’t draw anything’. What I should say, instead of cringing and wanting to talk about anything but my ‘specialness’ because I can slap some paint around now and then, is that ‘if you can write your name you can draw’. We are forced into the repetitive exercises as children of drawing triangles and squares and circles, eventually forming the triangles of A’s and the line with curves of B’s etc until we can finally draw the simple shaped alphabet and eventually put them together into words.
So, this show at the AGYU isn’t so much one of ‘nothing to see here ‘cept a bunch of writing’, as it was a reminder for me of the shape of the letters, of the visual aspect and relationship to drawing that the written word has. It was also a reminder of my experience in artschool with video and text.
Now, what the writing in this show communicates I couldn’t really tell you, besides what’s made obvious by the title of the show. These three text based works come from the genres mentioned, but I didn’t bother to read everything. Overwhelmed by the overall message of the function of letters as symbols and drawings, I didn’t really care to read what appeared to be mostly uninteresting.
The title says it all – there’s a text of pornography, by Fiona Banner, writ large, in hot pink, ‘she grabed his cock,’ etc, and the world as become so pornofied through the internet, iMovie and relatively cheap video cameras I was bored and unmoved. In the same room was a shelf with books, ‘The Nam’ which showed off a nice design, one of the books being displayed on a plinth, the text of which being some Vietnam war story in the same blocky font used for the porn story, this time printed black and single sided.
The middle room was a little more interesting. This was the sci-fi part, but here the experience is of a projected 8mm film, consisting of nothing but the words of some contrived alien drama. The cohesion of the story is pulled apart by the projector being on a robotic armature, so that it projects the text across the walls of the gallery at different times, always moving. The animation of the projection is what I appreciated by this, and at this point I was reminded of my artschool video, where I had a line that read:
‘I wanted to move you with images
Soft, subtle, sublime
But you cannot be moved by images, only silent words’
Here, you get the attempt by the artist Rosa Barba to move you with moving words, which aren’t even silent, as we have to listen to the whir of the oldschool 8mm machine.
The back room had the ‘horror video’ by Nathalie Melikian, which again consisted of sentences that I didn’t bother to read, (I know – I’m a horrible critic) the horror aspect seemingly conveyed by the ominous soundtrack.
The PR for this show states: ‘ In conjunction with this year’s Images Festival [which is now over], the AGYU presents Fiona Banner, Rosa Barba, and Nathalie Melikian, artists who look at film but project it to another end–as film experienced through language, which is why the exhibition Horror, Science Fiction, Porn includes no actual films. This international group of artists – from Britain, Germany, and Canada – looks at language’s determinant conditioning and indeterminate effects through a variety of film genres. The conventions that establish a genre (right from the start with the writing of the script) and those that manipulate the spectator, are only partly at play in this examination as these artists relate the genres of science fiction, action, horror, and pornography to their constructions, technical apparatus, and reception.’
If the PR is the recipe for how we, the audience born yesterday, are supposed to respond, I think it’s a failure. If you check out this show, there’s no way you would respond according to this formula, but at least the language the AGYU is putting out is getting better (perhaps prompted by Jennifer McMackon’s blog which has been publicizing the ‘discombobulated PR’ you get from these institutions over the past year).
It’s text … on walls. And for the PR to say that it contains no films at all is dishonest, as the sci-fi piece uses 8mm, and the back room uses video, which admittedly isn’t film, but what’s the difference?
While film seems to be all about animating images, the use of film to project text in two of these peices blends the forms in ways that seem similar to Kelly Mark’s wooden ceramics. As for the porn piece, it seems nothing more profound than Playboy wallpaper. The most generous thing I can say about it is that it reminds me of the old double-entendre, ‘You wanna come upstairs to check out my prints?’
Kelly Mark at Wynick Tuck is on until April 30 and the show at YYZ is on until May 21, both at 401 Richmond St, and both galleries are closed Sundays and Mondays.
The AGYU show continues until June 12, at York University, Ross Building. Photos courtesy of the websites of Wynick Tuck and the AGYU.
The Crisis
Premise – 1. No one gives a shit about anything anymore. Is this true? What do people actually seem to care about?
Answer – When I say ‘people’ who do I mean? Have the generations become so stratified that one really should say:
a ‘what do old people care about’,
b ‘what do the middle aged care about?’
c ‘what do young people care about?’
d ‘what do teenagers care about?’
e ‘what do children care about?’
f ‘what do todlers care about?’
Notice how this is exactly the language of marketing research. And if you pay attention to trends, watch advertisements between the dramas and the laughs, and catch the pronouncements of the Marketeers when they make it into the news, you can answer each one.
a. What do old people care about?
Supposedly, old people care about health care. Access to medicine. The government is supposed to subsidize pills and make them easy to get a hold of. Old people are also supposed to be concerned with their retirement, and having their pensions and being able to enjoy their last years. They also supposedly have trouble getting in and out of the bathtub.
b. What do the middle aged care about?
Supposedly they care about sexual disfunction, and other medical conditions requiring the latest and greatest pill. New cars, home care, this generation seems to be the target of Canadian Tire ads for lawnmowers and power washers.
c. what do young people care about?
Supposedly, people within my age range care about bein’ kul. Too happenin to pay attention for very long, everything is zip wham flash – snappy headlines, snappy stories, George Stroumboulopoulos giving it to us straight by cutting out the fat. Dose!
Dude, I got to like get my concert tickets and shit, and I don’t watch TV because it’s stupid, and I can’t afford cable, and I don’t buy the paper cuz who cares? So how the fuck do you know what’s going on in the world?
I don’t cuz like, who cares?
-or-
I check out Reuters on the internet, drudgereport, watch The Daily Show …. So basically, the internet and The Daily Show is where you get your news?
Yeah.
-or-
I read the free weeklies
c. What do teenagers care about?
Apparently, teenagers have always been susceptible to vanity, self-esteem issues, and a desire to get laid. Apparently, adults have always thought this was terrible. The biological irony is that when they were teenagers, the same adults went through the same thing, only they grew up, learned why this was terrible etc – or at least that’s the old model.
Under the old model, the awfulness repeats itself and the parents are too inept at communication and memory that they give the kids a hard time, packing a suitcase full of issues for them to take into their young adulthood, and sabotaging their chances of having anything close to a fulfilling and sane relationship until they’re well into their 30s or 40s, if ever. Under the old model, the good parents can guide their kids through the process, so that they emerge mentally healthy at the end of it.
But under the New Model there are mother and daughter teams who prance around like they’re both 16. This creates the danger that the children think silly vanity is ok. I, however, imagine this scenario for that future: the horror of their botoxed parents shocks them into the awareness that unaging freakiness isn’t natural and that maybe nature’s got a good thing going with the whole ‘old folk dying to make way for the new’ thing. Eventually, the children of such people will realize this on their own and be embarrassed by the behavior of their parents who refused to grow up. (I’ve always found it more than a little weird how some people glorify immaturity since, by definition, maturity is when you’re at your prime, so why want to remain less than that? It’s like, everyone’s choosing to be ‘medium’ rather than ‘well done’. Perhaps it’s no accident that mediocre is so popular, the law of the distribution of averages withstanding).
d. What do children care about?
Apparently they can be reliably counted on to be fascinated with dinosaurs, and they like to play. Cartoons, and toys, and fanciful stories; sugar and spice and everything naughty and nice, this is what little people are made of. Especially sugar – candy fiends. Today, they are also inclined to care about weight loss.
e. What do toddlers care about?
I don’t know, learning to walk? Child development psychology is filling in those gaps for us, since no grown up alive seems able to remember their first few years outside of the womb. Probably because before we learned to speak, we had no way to organize our memories. I remember learning to spell my name one afternoon with a magic marker and a sheaf of paper, but I was past my toddler years by then.
So back to the problem – no one give a shit about anything. True or False?
T.
Because ‘no one’ doesn’t exist. Society no longer seems unified by anything except by the new language of demographics. Cultural identity is important, and people define themselves by their jobs. When you meet someone, you ask them what they do, looking to fill in the picture, looking for insight into what type of person they are. We all learn the dangers of stereotyping and prejudice, but all seem to have a feeling that a stockbroker is a different chap than a lawyer, and that the office copy girl’s life might be a bit more boring than a girl who introduces herself with the words, ‘I’m an actress’.
Interest groups, interest groups, interest groups everywhere!
So, a new question: is this a problem?
The Old School would answer that of course this is a problem. Everything is built out of the metanarratives – remember those? History, mythology, Jesus, Vitamin C …. there are problems in the world, we are citizens of a Western society, and further, citizens of a demographic nation! We have freedom of speech!
And the freedom to not give a shit.
I’m left thinking that the feeling of crisis that hangs in the air is only one under the Old Models. Under the new models, since no one cares, it’s nothing. People aren’t even paying attention. What’s the worst that could happen people ask? And what are the answers? No one can even come up with those, since everything seems to keep functioning.
Transit strike!
What transit strike, they came up with a last minute offer.
Election!
What election?
Do I really have to vote again?
Whatever, what does the government do?
As the Conservatives and the NDP keep reminding us – the Liberals haven’t done shit for 12 years and people with jobs still got their jobs, and people on welfare are still seen as poor suckers, and everywhere, Federal inaction has begun to give the impression that Ottawa isn’t necessary. They’re behind-the-scenes fellows … as long as the show keeps going on, no one thinks the stagehands are important, because razzle dazzle and …. wait, did I just see a celebrity in Yorkville? But that’s an old argument. Helicopters keep falling out of the sky because of Liberal inaction. And the broken promises, from getting rid of the GST on, it’s been Red Book dreams at election time, and the nightmare of policy review come afternoon.
Christ. I can’t help but say that the feeling of doom that I see hovering above the grave of John Paul II and the rest of the 20th Century’s cast of characters, is one exacerbated by my own dismal finances, and the irresponsibility of not even opening the bills that came in the mail because I didn’t have the money to pay them when they arrived. But now it’s all caught up with me and I’m dealing with it. I’ll get through it again; I’ll get through it for this week. I can say that a certain lack of courage of facing the problem then, because it seemed unsolvable, was out of a feeling that it’ll be solvable in the future, and in a sense that’s how it’s turned out, only the future came a little quicker than I expected. Anyway, I want to say that my behavior in this way mirrors that of the politicians and the leaders of our society. Focused on keeping the spinning machine from whirling out of control on a week by week basis – or, a quarter by quarter basis – they put off and juggle deadlines and ongoing problems. But eventually the chickens come home to roost. The Liberals are fucked because of everything John Ralston Saul warned us about ten years ago in The Unconscious Civilization. It’s all caught up to them.
The Prime Minister wanted to talk to the nation directly, because he doesn’t trust the filter of the media, and he thinks that he couldn’t do it through Parliament. Have you watched Parliament lately? There’s a call to order every few minutes. I don’t blame P.M. P.M. at all. I think it’s one of the few things he’s done that shows decisiveness. The fact that the media are all like, ‘it’s not a national crisis, what’s he thinking’ – all I can say is shame on them. The motherfuckers. They were spinning it as if the shows he was going to interrupt were a million time more important than mere politics.
Now, it’s easy to see the broadcasters as simply in the pockets of advertisers etc … of course they are … but I think what’s I found most bothersome was the visceral reaction – as if the fucking O.C. was suddenly sacred. The Globe and Mail – a print source, who is supposed to be competing with broadcasting! – took this line, printing a picture from the O.C. between politicians. Benedict the 16th – you interrupt the soap operas to show him waving to the crowd for the first time, sure – but our Prime Minister going head to head with Friends re-runs? Who does he think he is? The Pope?
Ok. Fine. I guess I have to accept that fact that whatever comes out of a Hollywood studio is in someways connected with the stringed beads and red threads of religion. Just have to face reality there. But I’m really embarrassed by a media so lacking in insight and imagination to equate speaking with your countrymen has only something you do in emergency. When actions speak louder than words, his action rose above the heckles of the Parliament and drowned out the talking heads and the Avid editors who’d have soundbited anything he’d said in Parliament to determinant of the message.
It almost makes me want to vote for the Liberals, if only Jack Layton wasn’t so damn sane and sensible. Honestly, why isn’t this guy running rings around the others? Oh, wait, I forget, because he doesn’t appeal to ‘the people’ as there are no people. Only demographics. I suppose I remain the overeducated, compassionate, bitchy demographic, which isn’t kul, and therefore, who cares what I think.
Of course, just because men and women are different does not mean that the differences are triggered by genes. People develop their talents and personalities in response to their social milieu, which can change rapidly. So some of today’s sex differences in cognition could be as culturally determined as sex differences in hair and clothing. But the belief, still popular among some academics (particularly outside the biological sciences), that children are born unisex and are molded into male and female roles by their parents and society is becoming less credible. [emphasis mine] Many sex differences are universal across cultures (the twentieth-century belief in sex-reversed tribes is as specious as the nineteenth-century belief in blood-deprived ovaries), and some are found in other primates. Men’s and women’s brains vary in numerous ways, including the receptors for sex hormones. Variations in these hormones, especially before birth, can exaggerate or minimize the typical male and female patterns in cognition and personality. Boys with defective genitals who are surgically feminized and raised as girls have been known to report feeling like they are trapped in the wrong body and to show characteristically male attitudes and interests. And a meta-analysis of 172 studies by psychologists Hugh Lytton and David Romney in 1991 found virtually no consistent difference in the way contemporary Americans socialize their sons and daughters. Regardless of whether it explains the gender disparity in science, the idea that some sex differences have biological roots cannot be dismissed as Neanderthal ignorance.
He goes on to say, after discusing the psychology of the taboo:
At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred. The reasons are understandable: Women really had been held back by bogus claims of essential differences. Now anyone who so much as raises the question of innate sex differences is seen as “not getting it” when it comes to equality between the sexes. The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.
Of course, this whole article has to do with the Larry Summers Affair over the winter.
Earlier in the week I dissed American intellectuals as largely all being lame, saying that the luminaries of thinking that populate American discourse tend to be Canadians working in American universities.
(Who are they you ask? Give yourself something to do and figure it out).
I forgot about Noam Chomsky. Chomsky doesn’t suffer from the mediocrity of the elites.
In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Nicholls argues that Bramante’s depiction of the philosopher Heraclitus is actually a portrait of Leonardo, but that the sunken eyes and tears are an affectation, as Heraclitus was seen to be a despairing philosopher, associated with melancholy.And here is Harold Bloom, with his ‘woe is me’ pose. Is Bloom really fucked up, or just using the the ‘ I’m a despairing genius!’ affectation?
While Bloom often has great perspectives and interesting things to say, I can’t help but feel this melancholic bullshit is an affectation of ‘greatness’ which Bloom projects because he wants to be seen as part of some pantheon; in reality, to me it highlights a level of mediocrity.
What the fuck is up with ‘the mediocrity of elites?’ Especially American ones, who get paraded about as if their contributions to arts and letters is something rivaling that of those from centuries past? I can count on both hands the number of truly great thinkers and contributors to the humanities in the past 50 years, and all of them are Canadian. Wait, let me think … nope, can’t come up with American names. While these thinkers may currently work in the States, they were raised in the Canadian education system.
Bloom himself credits Northrop Frye has having influenced him.
With the acquisition of the old photo album today: As I was looking at it, weighing the idea of spending ten dollars for it, I noticed that a large number of its pages were unused. The idea occurred to me, to fill this book with contemporary photographs, to have 1910 faded black and white at the beginning, and 2001 at the end. As well, the person selling the book had Carte de Visite for sale. I had browsed through them earlier, and had a strange feeling, of looking at 19th century faces, and of course, the image of William Gibson’s imagined art work, Read us the books and the Names of the Dead.
When I got this book home, I scanned in the images of the carte de visite I had bought, and glued them into the book. I had made a sign, which read, Prelude, the 19th Century, and then, those faces, those beards, how strange they were! It is a very different world we live in. As I placed those images on the glass of the scanner, especially the one that is dated and signed, 27th August 1866, I thought of the long journey they had made, and what a strange resting place that image had found on glass between plastic and electricity. The images appear on the screen, a technology unimagined when they represented the earliest days of reproduction.
Using my Palm, I was able to determine the dates of three photographs. The first two are in the album, and are obviously taken at around the same time, since they are meant to echo one another. A picture preceding these was of a grave stone, clearly marked with a date of death of 27 May 1910. The grave is fresh, and there are flowers placed around it. I thus knew that these images were around 1910. I also noticed that the last day was a Saturday the 30th. Using my Palm, I was able to determine that it was either April 1910, September 1911, or November 1912, since those are the only months containing 30 days upon which the 30th fell on a Saturday. Closer inspection of the calendar showed that the weekends were colored differently than the weekdays, and that the first Monday was coloured differently as well. Aha! Labour day! It is September 1911. Just to make sure, I checked on the net to see when Labour Day came about, and it was established in the 1880s, so I am thus reasonably sure that these two photographs were taken that September.
The other photo, once again, a family, posed in front of a calendar. This wasn’t clear, so I scanned it in, and zoomed it up to a legible size. Manipulating the brightness and the contrast, I was able to see a clear date emerge: 1920. And, once again using the Palm, I scanned through the months for the number combination as it existed in the image: that is primarily, a Monday the 2nd, a Sunday the 8th, Sunday the 15th and a Sunday the 22nd. The Sunday the 1st wasn’t visible, so I thought that it must have been washed out by the flash. I found that August 1920 fits that description, and thus I wrote that on the back of the photo. Now regarding that grave: I want to find this grave, I want to stand where they stood and take the same photograph, only in 21st Century terms: that is, a colour snapshot, 35mm. I want to paste this in the back of the book, at roughly the same place, to provide a symmetry, and to show what 90 years does to the trees and to graves. The grave is that of a Charles Hayne, who died on “27 May 1910, at the age of 55 years 7 months”. I tried to use the net to find some records of him – this of course yielded no results and frustrated me. I now want to go to the archives downtown, and look up his death record, to find where he is buried. I think the person who sold me the book said that it came from Bridgeport, which is down around Kitchener. If I can find this information, this summer, it would be a project to accomplish.
Mr. Grace Kelly, His Serene Highness, lover of not only democracy and the common man, but the economics of the high-class resort, gambling, decadence, and luxury.
‘Do you realize that right now there is no one on Earth who is infallible? The whole thing is being run by human beings. I’m not sure if you’re aware of their track record…’
I went into Downfall with a certain reluctance; I came out with a new understanding of the history of the 20th Century. That’s no small thing, and is one of the reasons that I agree with all the good press this movie has been getting. It was not only the best World War II movie I’d ever seen, but one of the best films in general.
I wanted to see it because I’m a student of history, and I’d heard that this was based on interviews conducted with Hitler’s secretary, who was in her 20s during the last two years of the war when she worked for him. Because of this, the story is centered around her character more so than the others; but the nature of the story means we get insight into the swirl of events and the poisonous personalities involved, huddled in the underground Bunker, listening to the thunderous rumbles as the approaching Russian army shells the city.
A few years ago I was at a great talk by the painter Tony Scherman, and in his presentation he brought up the fact that in our world, with TV all over the planet, chances are there is something on the Nazis playing 24 hours a day – that at this minute, somewhere, there’s a Nazi show on. He brought it up to point out the project of ‘never forgetting’ that seems to be behind it.
At the time I was struck by the fact that, you know, history is full of atrocity, and we tend to forget them. It also seems unfair that we privilege certain stories of atrocity while ignoring others. In addition, I’ve felt that we’re living in a totally different world, so why should we keep obsessing over this stuff?
Seeing Downfall helped me understand how traumatic the war was. It’s a cliché of criticism to say that we keep getting a sanitized version of war, even now when Speilberg made Saving Private Ryan and how he made sure to have that scene of a guy looking for his arm; but that film failed in the end to make me realize the trauma because it was such a sentimental story that fundamentally seemed to insult intelligence; but similar scenes involving amputation in Downfall may have made me flinch, but this was something they experienced and took for granted, so why should I feel put upon watching it, knowing in the end it’s makeup? But the difference here, is that Downfall is a true story, an accurate recreation, filmed in a way so that by the end, I was creeped out. As I should have been. The Nazis were seriously creepy folk, which is something that isn’t usually conveyed by documentaries or by cartoon villainy.
It helped me understand that the war was such a disruptive and psychologically unsettling event, something that was the result of centuries of events, all tumbled together and out of control, that movies like this are made (that the Nazi Entertainment Industry is founded on) simply trying to understand it. The sixty years which have past seems perhaps too short a time to fully grasp what happened.
At the same time, as the recent death of the Pope reminds me, we are entering a new understanding. Because John Paul II became a priest during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and that the Cold War which he is credited with doing much to end, was a result of the epilogue of the fall of Berlin to the Red Army.
I grew up going to gun shows with my father throughout the Maritimes and saw so many Nazi artifacts that I took them for granted, artifacts being sold to collectors who wanted a piece of history more than being of the neo-variety. Such a thing to this day cannot happen in Germany – you can’t publicly display anything from that era. So, there was some controversy when this movie came out last year in Germany, because this is a German film with big-name German actors. And that was one of the things that made this so compelling – to see a film in the language in which the events actually took place, and with the historical accuracy that memory of survivors would demand. This new period of World War II studies includes films such as this, made not so much to entertain, but to document and to understand.
I’m not going to say you should go see this movie – there are lots of understandable reasons why anyone would chose not to. All I’m going to say is that I doubt you’d regret it, and thus it is highly recommended.
If you’ve been along Queen West and past the Drake this past month, you may have noticed the large target in a window. You may have thought it was a promotional display. But, no … it’s a work by Kristiina Lahde, and will be up until the end of the week. When I first saw it a couple of weeks ago, I was a little struck by it’s lack of umph. Lahde has taken advert fliers and cut concentric circles from them in order to produce the target pattern. It was only later that I began to sort of see the ideas come together; the ads, the target, the window; all these things are usually designed to suck you into the store – you are to be the arrow flying toward the door.
When I was growing up my father hated heavy metal music, and especially the videos. He ran a gun-shop out of the house, and the occasional weekend was spent at the gun range shooting at targets, developing sniper-like skills. To this day I can hit a bottle cap 100 metres away, because I spent all that time staring through sights at the bull’s eye. My Dad, back in the 80s, used to say that heavy metal musicians would make good target holders. I’m not sure bringing that up is really relevant, except to say that I don’t tend to think about targets much, and perhaps that’s why. They’re something I tend to take for granted, something meant to be shot at. My Dad turned them into a metaphor of frustration and dislike.
So it’s perhaps appropriate because Lahde has by coincidence extended that metaphor toward the junk-mail advertising industry. Lahde, in using adverts, has made the models and the products the target. As she states in her artist statement, she aims to highlight their junk-mail status by disrupting their function by cutting into them.
In his 1999 book, A Short History of the Future Warren Wagar described a future art, based around what we’d call socialism, that was a revived form of Realism. ‘Artists and writers blended meticulous realism with a reawakened sense of moral possibility,’ he wrote. ‘It made heroes and heroines out of common folk […]. Critics occasionally drew unkind comparisons between substantialist art and the ‘socialist realism’ decreed by Joseph Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov in … Soviet Russia. But the truly creative minds went well beyond anything imagined in the sterile diatribes of these long-dead comrades.’ In trying to imagine what such paintings might be like, I thought of the work of BC’s Chris Woods, who plays on the idea that the Church was the first franchise, and from that began to see the types of ads Kristiina uses in a new way. Like Socialist Realism, these adverts are full of smiling people.
In a January 1999 article/review of the advertising industry’s Clio awards published in Harper’s, Jonathan Dee wrote:
“An evening at the Clios makes more or less inescapable the connection between this sort of sponsored art and the art of the American television commercial: an aesthetic, in the term suggested by sociologist Michael Schudson, of ‘capitalist realism.’ Of course there are important semantic differences (Soviet art glorifies the producer; American advertising, the consumer), as well as a near reversal of the values such art is commissioned to protect – except, perhaps, to the degree that power itself can be considered a value. But the central value of American capitalist realism remains, for all its staggering refinement, as old as Marx: the fetishism of commodities. Capitalist realism amounts to an insistent portrait of the world as a garden of consumption in which any need – no matter how antimaterial, how intimate, or how social – can be satisfied by buying the right things. The relationship between the human qualities with which this art animates a given commodity and the commodity itself is a wholly fictional one, and it is upon that fiction, you could say, that our economy rests.”
I can’t help but feel that this type of concern has passed, at least on the surface. We all have memories surrounding The Battle of Seattle and its like circa 1999-2001, all of which seemed to dissolve with so much else in that reverse mushroom cloud that day in Manhattan. Consumerism doesn’t seem to be as bad as the moral outrage surrounding the subsequent Iraq war, which is so current today that Paul Isaacs got his review of a bad movie read on air last week by George Stroumboulopoulos because of how he worked into it a poke at the Bush administration.
I don’t think Lahde had all this in mind when she proposed and executed target; I’m kind of just riffing here, but it’s interesting that something so insubstantial – adverts, pasted to a window, subject to an exacto-knife, sum up the Left’s social concerns over the past five years. Since wars are all about targets and as Isaacs expressed in his review, the ‘invasion under false pretenses’ is for the Right and the Left sticky enough for both side’s outrage. Everyone’s annoyed about being lied to. Advertising, we sometimes forget, is always about that. It’s always some kind of fantasy, infantalizing adults as hopelessly lost fellows who need a product to rescue them, just as the Iraqi people supposedly needed rescuing by the gun-sights of American tanks and bombers. Capitalist Realism of smiling people frolicking in savings and greeting their liberators in the streets targets us all. It’s fortunate that we’re all capable of seeing through the exaggerated artifice.
(A Short History of the Future quote from pages 194/195 of the 3rd edition. Photo courtesy of Kristiina Lahde.)
Over the past three weeks I’ve been reading Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, which I learned of by way of Darren O’Donnell’s ‘
The Podern was so called because P followed O which followed N which followed M; so wrote the historian who coined the term. But a rival school of thought argues that the Podern is specific to the autumn of 2001 when Apple Incoperated introduced the iPod, which became the defining artifact of the time. As the iPod allowed for the assembly and playback of a vast amount of files (which hadn’t been possible before, and the iPod’s storage capacity at the time was unique) it is seen to be an appropriate term for this period since its culture consisted to a large extant of reassembly and recontextualization.
When the individual has reached a hundred years of age, he is able to do without love and friendship. Illness and inadvertent death are not things to be feared. He practices one of the arts, or philosophy or mathematics, or plays a game of one-handed chess. When he wishes, he kills himself. When a man is the master of his own life, he is also the master of his death.’
Earlier this week I posted an email interview with Matt Crookshank, who is showing with Lisa Pereira at Gallery 61 until July 3. This is the interview with her I mentioned would be upcoming. I first met Lisa two years ago, the same night that Andrew Harwood asked me to be part of the Michael Jackson show that he curated with Lex Vaughan and which got a lot of press. In almost every review – which seemed to be in every paper – Lisa’s video was mentioned, which was a surprising accomplishment for someone who at the time had told me wasn’t sure if she’d flunked out of OCAD or not. (In the end she did have to take a year off due to academic probation, and is due to graduate next year).
Matt Crookshank currently has a show on right now with Lisa Pereira (interview with her to come) at Gallery 61, entitled, Diamonds in the Ruff and which runs until July 3. It is easily some of the most unique work out there at the moment, and so I sent Matt some questions.
So, like I mentioned in my last posting, I was at the MOCCA opening last week. I wasn’t planning to go, really – I planned on going to the latest show at YYZ, but a friend told me about the MOCCA party where she was going so we made plans to meet there. I arrived early, after checking out the show at 401 Richmond, and then my friend showed up, but she got into interesting conversations with other people, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I wandered around introducing myself to other people for kicks (which I guess is a way to say that the art didn’t hold my attention). But I guess it never really does for very long, especially at openings, and especially at openings in the summer which also consider themselves parties. ‘Seen one, seen ’em all’ I’ve been known to say, and the thing is that’s not really unfair since artists are so invested in the idea of a series. Perhaps I’ve opened myself up to the criticism that I don’t know what I’m doing – writing about art and all – but I tend to think it’s a skill acquired from the channel surfing culture. New technologies introduce new skill sets and exploit unknown talents, n’est-ce-pas?
I was at the MOCCA opening the other night (more on that later) and while there checked out the Dan Hughes show at Edward Day next door. To be absolutely honest, I was looking at the paintings while in the middle of introducing myself to a girl who turned out to be a painting student at OCAD, so we talked about it from the perspective of both being familiar with the medium. At one point I said, ‘these are too 17th Century for me,’ referring to their dark colour schemes. And I bring that up only to say straight away that the paintings weren’t absorbing 100% of my attention.
Ah the isms, can’t live with ’em, can’t have good arguments without them. And for the past thirty years, we’ve seen a flourishing of isms, one that could almost be said to have sprung from the fertilized soil of the World War’s dead a generation prior. To some they were flowers, to others they have been weeds.
This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance 
Now that winter is but a memory for another few months, it’s safe to exhibit its images I suppose, without the groan of ennui that sets in come March. Opening at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery on Friday is a show by Mike Bayne, the PR for which reads:
Kelly Mark is everywhere right now – at 
I went into Downfall with a certain reluctance; I came out with a new understanding of the history of the 20th Century. That’s no small thing, and is one of the reasons that I agree with all the good press this movie has been getting. It was not only the best World War II movie I’d ever seen, but one of the best films in general.
