Thoughts

I’ve come to realize that the CBC is obsolete, and all the fuss and bother about classical music ‘disappearing’ from CBC 2 is pointless. I listen to classical on the net all the time. I prefer it actually, since I can do without the CBC hosts. (That promo guy they have on now drives me nuts; not to mention all the other falsely enthusiastic banter).

For the past two days this is what I listened to at work:

http://www.icebergradio.com/ – classical section, baroque and renaissance.

I’ve been sympathetic to Russell Smith’s defense of CBC 2 in his Globe column over the past couple of years, even bringing up his arguments to a CBC employee I once knew.

Marc Weisblott, in reviewing this for his latest ‘Scrolling Eye’ post on the Eye website, writes

What [Russell Smith] said during a debate on CBC Radio One’s The Current on Wednesday was a bit more nuanced, though, advocating radio for “the sensitive kid bored by the beer-drinking frat culture” like he was. “There are hundreds of thousands of emo kids, and underprivileged kids, around the country who need an escape from the boredom of the bored mass culture around them.”

But, when those proverbial emo kids have never touched a terrestrial radio in their lives, the only place to turn is to the vitriolic greybeards.

…Exactly. I was one of those sensitive kids bored then & now by frat culture, and that’s why I listened to CBC 2. But I’m dismayed to find the same voices on it that were there when I was a child (Jurgen Gothe, I’m thinking of you, and wish you well in your upcoming retirement).

The internet is now there for curious and sensitive youth. With regard to classical, I tend to use Wikipedia to find a location to download it from when I want something for the iPod. The only way Smith’s argument stands up for me is to consider sensitive bored kids using dial-up on the Prairie. In that case, one should bring the protests to the likes of Bell, who’ve begun throttling bandwidth.

To remain relevant to the 21st Century, the CBC should become an ISP, and primarily focus on net streams. Radio should be so old hat to them they could afford to treat it as an afterthought. The situation at the present moment is the reverse. While they did revamp their website last fall, they are still focused on using Windows Media Player, still being stingy with MP3 downloads and podcasting, and still have a stream which is prone to buffering errors.

I get the message, and the message I have in return is

Fuck you too CBC 2.

Called The Campaign to End Parodies of Old School Educational Films In Advertisements and Promos.

Who the fuck are the hipsters who think that’s cool?

Probably brought to you by this guy, or more likely, this one.

Studio photography session + 40 years =

This is also the year during which Sir Paul is 64. I doubt he was thinking he’d be going through a bitter divorce, nor that the studio session would result in the work being reduced to a glyph in a computer’s software program for a company that he’d had a part in suing, a company run by someone who really likes his band. Nor could he have imagined this album cover would be the first image shown by Steve Jobs when showing off the iPhone last January.

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.

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.

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.

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.

…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.

A reflection on offensive images in the news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Maze in The Shinning

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.

(From The Doubter’s Companion, 1994)

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.

A list of Canadians who have contribited substantially to society and are making the world a better, more sane place.

Most links are to articles on wikipedia.org

John Peters Humphrey (1905 – 1955)
wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908.10.15 – )
economist who played a key role in the US Kennedy Administration as one of Kennedy’s best advisors

Marshall McLuhan (1911.07.21 – 1980.12.31)
philosopher who initated a new understanding and a philosophy of the electronic media

Jane Jacobs (1916 – )
urban affairs activist

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

Steven Pinker writes here:

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.

Today, a fellow on trial for rape in Atlanta grabbed the guard’s gun and shot his way out of the courtroom, killing three people. What a week for craziness! Let’s recap:

Thursday, March 3: 4 RCMP officers are killed by a nut with a rifle. The media treat this like it’s the end of Canada. The mourn-porn continues with a rebroadcast of the memorial tomorrow.

Sunday, March 6 : This evening, a man throws his daughter off a 401 overpass in an attempt to murder her, and then he jumps off and kills himself.

Tuesday, March 8: the police stop a guy with a knife on Yonge St. There is video footage, so it gets on the news. Oh, so dramatic.

Wednesday, March 9: a fellow sets himself on fire in front of Queen’s Park, after ramming some cop cars with the rented Budget van. Budget gets free advertising as the whole thing is captured on camera, because there was an farmer’s protest at Queens Park at the time. The nut didn’t know that, crashed the party, and stole the show. The farmers bitched about it.

Today, March 11: the fellow in Atlanta, and JetsGo discount airlines go belly up and strand all their potential passengers, laying off their entire workforce.

Something is happening at large, some kind of doom is prepping itself, and the shit is hitting the fan. My favorite though is this guy shooting himself out of courtroom as if he was Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. I’m sure the Hollywood hacks are already at their keyboards prepping the drafts of that one.

On another note, today’s email from Joey Comeau asked, ‘have you seen the trailer for A Scanner Darkly yet?’ I hadn’t, so I checked it out here. Wow, 2005 – the year of the animated painting. There’s something massive right there – that we’re at the point to pull off something like that.

This image of Winnoa Ryder has a very limited palette. My self-portrait, that I made in Photoshop at the end of 2002 and now use as a logo – it was hard to reduce that to a simple palette. When I do the images today – well, I haven’t in a long while – but when I do, I try to sample the image’s colour, and just make it more blocky, and homogenize a section. A Scanner Darkly is a masterpiece of drawing, colouring, and of digitization. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out in September.

To be able to essentially make a movie that is pretty much nothing more than an animated painting – and this isn’t like that movie Linklater made in 2001 that gave me a headache to watch – that says something to Danto’s ideas about the ‘End of Art’.

In today’s Maisonneuve Mediascout:

MediaScout can’t help look at the events of the past week through the prism of Canada’s near-obsession with understanding and building its sense of identity. Simply put, stories of sacrifice are the backbone of any national myth. Lives lost in the defense of values held dear bring nations together like nothing else – just look to the US, where amid bitter divisions over the war in Iraq, no Democrat would question the value of US soldiers’ sacrifice. Canada, however, doesn’t fight a war every couple of years. And when we do stand on guard for thee, we take every possible precaution to keep our men and women out of the line of fire. That’s fine, we’re not a warring people, but it does mean less death-less sacrifice, when those are the stories that define a nation’s sense of purpose. And so, when four young Mounties are taken from us so brutally, we feel it; because we are reminded of what sacrifice means; and we get to know the fallen; and we come to realize just how brave they were in simply doing their job.

Reminds me of the way Robert Thurman summarized western civilization as militaristic. Like the story that Canadian identity was born during World War I, because the joe from Alberta was in the muck with the fellow from Quebec. What’s really behind that story is people got to hang out with one another from all over the country. Kind of like these party conventions that are in the news.

I’d prefer a national myth that focuses on dialogue, rather than fucking heroic-death sacrifice bullshit.

I’d prefer that we don’t build an identity around violence. Sure, have your big national funeral and media coverage. But I have to say that I care less about this than I did about Trudeau’s funeral. I felt like I was living through something then, I could understand the line-ups to see him lie in state. This RCMP thing isn’t something I can relate too as easily.

“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Simon Houpt, in today’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best). He continues:

I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art.On the day the curtains were unfurled, the manager on duty at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South escorted me to the club’s ninth-floor ballroom so I could see the piece from on high. He had no idea why I wanted to go up there: He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, “Are they advertising that fabric?”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot. [emp. mine]

I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.

Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’.

One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.

Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation:

I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another “Why make a ferris wheel for cars?” Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied “Promotion.”

which was a reply to this post by Jennifer McMackon.

There’s also the Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes,

Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’.”

(or, it’s the equivalent of some crackers)

A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.

Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.

I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional’ forms, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.

When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (‘I’m gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘.

(a version of this also appears here)

In today’s Globe and Mail, I saw the headline for an article (same report here since The Globe’s archives are moneywalled) which read: “Vatican denounces ‘health-fiend’ madness’, with the sub-heading, “Rejecting society’s costly quest for cures, Rome says Pope’s suffering is to be admired”.

I didn’t read the article, since I felt no need. This has been the Vatican’s position on their increasingly incapacitated leader for years … the Pope wants to promote an acceptance of life as it is, rather than run from all of it’s problems. His illness is likened to the Christ’s willingness to be tortured to save the souls of humanity. It also follows in the Pope’s desire for a ‘culture of life‘ which is one that accepts the disabled and the infirm instead of a political debate on euthanasia, which he’s argued, is nothing more than the healthy desiring to eliminate and hide from things that make them uncomfortable. Those of us familiar with the arguments from the poverty-lobby know what he’s talking about here. Treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance.

Unfortunately, this dismissal on medicine is too much inline with Neitzsche’s analysis of Christianity as a religion of slaves, which is quite literally was in the beginning. The Church becomes an apologist for social injustice, promoting the idea that life isn’t fair and you’d better get used to it, and better yet, find metaphorical meaning in your state of injustice.

It could be argued that the default setting of a human being is that of a religious animal – that spirituality plays a big part of our lives, since the mind naturally looks for meaning in the world, through it’s pattern recognition engine. That’s what psychology has given us, a sensible explanation for our spiritual beliefs. It doesn’t detract from them in anyway, to know how it works, and for me it encourages a healthy attitude toward spirituality as part of a balanced psychology. But we understand there’s a profound difference between spirituality and being religious. Religion has come to be seen by many as a way to keep the ignorant in line – that’s been argued for centuries now. It is a secular position. It seems to follow that if people are prone to religiosity to express their spirituality by default, education almost always eliminates that desire, and makes people in some cases atheists, but in most cases, appreciative of a secular division between religion and state. Pierre Trudeau was an ardent Catholic, but he knew better to be one in public. The USA has not been so fortunate yet, as their presidents turn going to Church into photo ops, to court the votes of their citizens who have gone through their dismal school system. That gimmick alone is probably why they refuse to reform their schools, since then their politicking would get a lot more difficult than simply showing up for photo ops and giving simplistic campaign speeches.

Martin Luther’s Reformation came about because by 16th Century, the Church, which had nurtured education, had become a nest of secular, and in some cases, atheistic individuals (which they wouldn’t have admitted, but it’s fair to say they were cynical). They were making money selling absolutions and enjoying the comforts of a high social standing. They were the CEO’s of their day, disengaged, uncaring, and doing everything they could to maintain their privileged status quo. Even after the Reformation, the Church remained corrupt, so that by the 18th Century, (in France anyway) it was a target of disdain by the Encyclopediaists and Volatire, and in the 20th Century seems to have been a haven for homosexuals well versed in the ideals of Greek Love (not so much pedophiles, but a love for pubescent teenage boys, see this Slate article for more). So, anyway, the point is that the priesthood has often been corrupted by scandal, whether sexual or idealistic. Heretics and perverts, for 2000 years, but still able to nurture culture and thought during the long fall of the Roman Empire.

As a religion of slaves, the Church is an apologist for social injustice. It propagates that injustice even today, with it’s refusal to admit condoms are a good thing. Abortion is something else entirely – as something that celebrates life, as a spiritual exercise, there’s no way it can ever condone abortion. As President Clinton said of abortion, ‘it should be safe, legal and rare’. People who turn abortion into a factor of dehumanization, and go so far as to want to kill abortionists, are clearly more on the Devil’s side than God’s. But religious opposition to abortion encourages us, and reminds us, to treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance. The fact that there’s a difference between a collection of cells and a baby is what allows those of us who support abortion rights to sleep at night.

The prevalence of abortion as a convenience and form of birth control because women aren’t able to face the prospect of being a mother so young, nor being a single mom, especially under conditions of poverty, is a measure of how unjust and how unfavorable our society is toward life. So when the Pope, or even President Bush, talks about nurturing a ‘culture of life’ rather than one of death, I am sympathetic.

Writing from the perspective of the 26th Century, Richard Morgan, in Altered Carbon, describes Catholics this way:

‘Catholics,’ said Ortega, lip curling, ‘Old-time religious sect.’ […] ‘Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and half-thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practice birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favor is that this d.h.f thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity’.

The d.h.f thing is the central premise of the novel, that in the future you can digitize a human’s mind and transfer it from body to body, enabling practical immortality as long as the chip at the base of your skull is not destroyed. In the novel, Catholics have taken the stance that you can’t digitize a soul, and so this is all very immoral and forbidden, even though the rest of society as reformed itself around this reality, which has actually led to a retrogression, since, removing death means it is no longer an effective motivator, nor is it terrifying, so torture – the infliction of memorable pain – is now much more common and necessary, and culture stagnates because memory is so long.

The Vatican can denounce health fiend madness all it wants, and keep propping up their chief invalid, but their philosophical justifications for the most part aren’t helping anybody. It is quite probable that by the 2500s, Richard Morgan’s dialogue will be spoken in actuality by somebody, since Catholicism has too often used it’s philosophers to try and pin down the injustice of the status quo. When I wrote the other day that just because certain problems have been around since Roman times does not so much mean they are timeless as they’re indications that we’re very good procrastinators, it does occur to me now that the procrastination has been helped because the Vatican keeps feeding society’s leaders with excuses not to do anything. And hence, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’.

Dear Pope,

Timothy

Read this today in Defamer:

Brad Pitt will star in the mind-bendingly self-referential Sony pic Chad Schmidt, where he’ll play an actor that can’t get work because he looks too much like Brad Pitt. You know, kind of like Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp. [Variety]

Which reminded me of the project I wanted to do last year, where I wanted to make a video that consisted of a Charlie Rose type interview with an actor, who plays me in a future biopic. Inspired by the appearance of Ed Harris on Charlie Rose when he was promoting Pollock, I basically wanted to do the same thing: interview, with clips from the film. Project didn’t get off the ground for different reasons: no money, no film equipment, too much of mind bender. But as I’ve said about another backburnered project (I have a very big stove with lots of backburners) no reason why I can’t do it in the future.

With Pitt’s movie coming out, and with my idea in mind, I’ve got to thinking about how our time has stopped moving forward, and become nothing more than a pool. Was it Derrida who wrote about this? I don’t know, who can understand him anyway? Time is always compared to a river, which is a very Western conception … time flows in a linear way. Other cultures throughout the world saw time in a cyclical nature, inspired by the regularity of the seasons. Myself, I experience a bit of both … time flows from a distant past, but as Mark Twain said, “Time doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme”, or the other saying I think about, “The more things change the more they stay the same”. Reading history can shock you into a feeling that despite lots of superficial advancements, human beings behave consistently. That’s human nature for you.

Reading the Dune novels in my early 20s though gave a me a sense for deep stretches of time. Those novels cover something like 5000 years, with the emperor Leto II having had a 3000 year reign, due to the spice and other intricacies of the storyline. It made me wonder what our world would be like had an Egyptian pharaoh achieved this type of longevity … imagine having some king who’d be around for 3000 years. In the Dune novels, there’s little cultural variation over these lengthy time periods, because of the status quo of long lived leaders. It helps make me aware that we’re only 2000 years away from the time of Christ, and we think that’s a big deal. But in reality, our species has been on the planet, and creating culture for 195,000 years. We are a very different type of human, but our history divided into centuries is actually pretty insignificant … and hence, we can see that just because social injustice has been around since the time of the Roman Empire, it’s not so much that they’re timeless problems, but that we happen to be very good procrastinators.

Our own time period encourages this procrastination by immersing us in ‘tradition traps’. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collaspe, describes how cultural stubbornness prevented the Norse from eating fish and working with the natives in Greenland, and hence, their colony collapsed. The tradition traps that we are in the midst of are held in place by advertising and all these mixed media messages – a news story on global warming and environmental degradation is followed by an SUV commercial or a TV show glamorizing a lifestyle that is inherently selfish and harmful. As much as we want to be happy in our lives and have a sort or relaxed approach to things, we don’t think that individually we matter too much, and that the sort of things we see happen in the workplace that are wrong, or the choices we make as to where to vacation, matter.

Stuck in a nostalgia loop of marketing, with previous decades being re-presented to us, with ‘greatest hits’ compilations and what not, which should be marketed, or presented, as form of history, are instead presented to us as a rebranded part of our present. In the past – in the 20th Century, the future was something that people envisioned, and planed for. They tried to guide the course of the stream. Today, for a variety of reasons beyond what I’ve already described, the future has been lost. The older generation – our establishment – have failed in the imagination of the future. Even the latest Star Trek show has fallen into re-using plots from the past franchises, and has recently been canceled. Why this generation has failed to lead, to imagine, is only because of the industry of management. John Ralston Saul is my intellectual hero because he really nailed this in the 1990s – how our society had overproduced managers, whose job it is to manage, not imagine. I also can’t help but think that this generation failed because they were blindsided by digitization. In the early 1990s, fax machines and interactive television were seen to be the wave of the future, and bam, along comes the World Wide Web and eBay, Amazon, and Google.

My recent Goodreads selections, documents from the future, show me that imagining the future hasn’t gone away. It’s only been underreported, underrepresented, because people who grew up with computers and watching science-fiction, and thinking about things in ways that reflect our experience of the late 20th Century, aren’t yet part of the establishment. Debates in this country on green-energy and gay marriage, seem pointless to us because we’ve been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The sci-fi of the 1980s – the last real decade of imagination – inspired us to what our world might be like as 21st Century adults. It was a world of liberal values, inclusiveness, and one that alternated between a violent dystopia and a technological utopia. In 2005 we’ve gotten both.

The dreams for the future that got us this far are now out of gas. We’ve become self-referential. Brad Pitt playing himself is part of what this decade is about, but this was already present fifty years ago, when Richard Sherman’s character in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch referred to ‘the blond in the kitchen’ as maybe being Marilyn Monroe. Seeing that movie the other night was an example of the more things change… since our lives today are still about ‘kids today’ and television, and stress, counting calories, and summer’s being too hot. What has changed is the place of women in society, no longer so domesticated to be sent off to Maine for the holidays. Thank goodness for that. That movie is not as delightful as it once was because it isn’t fair to women. Hence, the more they stay the same, the more things change.

My own project came from a desire for context. To sort-of understand my place in current events – a chance to reproduce some of my favorite scenes in biopics, where a character has a radio on or the news or whatever, contextualizing the story in history. I often felt like my life had become cinematic in that way standing next to newspaper boxes in the month immediately after September 2001. I also wanted to play with the idea that we get it wrong whenever we make these biopics, because as a re-creation of the past, liberties are taken. So I wanted to make something that used the stereotypes of our time to engage in a simulacra, stuff like have the actor playing me wearing Tommy Hilfiger stuff even though I refuse to buy anything that’s Tommy. Trying to represent how this time might be envisioned by the future by using it’s most extreme examples. I mean, a film like Pollock that was set in the 1950s, had a very different use of time-period objects than did The Seven Year Itch which was actually made during that decade.

I was also inspired by the type of delightful mindbender like Adaptation where Charlie Kauffman wrote himself into the story. But I guess a reason I didn’t really pursue it was, A) I didn’t get the grant, and B) I have a hard enough time living as I am without trying to step outside of myself to turn myself into a character … and biopics always centre around ‘the great love story’ and there hasn’t been one for me yet, so such a project is premature. Nor have there been really dramatic things to ‘excerpt’ for Mr. Rose in the 22nd Century.

Romeo Dallaire was being interviewed on Hot Type, and described trying to negotiate with the fuckers who’d organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He said that they had the form of a human being, but they had ceased to be human. It totally reminded me of Ann Coulter. People keep making a joke about how she’s a robot, which I don’t find funny. She’s one seriously evil bitch. One of these days, in one of these columns of her’s, she’s gonna call for something like genocide. Psychologists tell us that dehumanizing your enemy is the first step toward anything approaching genocide.

One of the haunting questions of the 20th Century is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim’s status of cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity my making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people’s compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object. […]…Accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and ‘cold jokes; that make light suffering … flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from ‘person’ to ‘nonperson’ making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate p.273/74 & 320/21

Having seen that 5th Estate documentary on the inflammatory Right Wing, my only feeling is in their dehumanization of Lefties, and their own inability to admit that they might be wrong about stuff, they are excersizing evil. And that’s not rhetoric…

But I don’t want to make their mistake by dehumanizing Coulter … at this point, yeah, she’s inhuman, but for all we know she’ll recant in a few years like George Wallace eventually did. Wallace tried to play the race card all the way to the White House, cynically exploiting the bigotry of the South. My impression is the Coulter and Bill O’Reilly have found celebrity through a similar means of cynically exploiting American ignorance and hatred for diversity. Perhaps all of their vile spit is simply a symptom that they’re having a hard time living with themselves.

Sticks and Stones, the 5th Estate the documentary is viewable here in Real Video

The 5th Estate’s Website

Ann Coulter and right-wing stupidity

Comments on the Coulter video on Metafilter

Bill O’Reilly’s pissed with the CBC

(whoopee shit, go fuck yourself O’Reilly, or just “Shut Up!”)

With news that the Pope is in hospital, CBC leads The National with that story, saying that across Churches tonight people were praying for the Pope. Why? He’s the Pope – he’s going to Heaven. After 83 years, witnessing the Nazi and then the Communist occupation of his homeland, and now wracked by disease and age, a ticket to Paradise should be welcome.

Do you think the Pope fears death? A man who’s devoted his life to trying to share his faith with others, his faith that death is nothing to be feared? As Jesus himself said, albeit Jesus a played by Willem Dafoe in the blasphemous The Last Temptation of Christ, “Death isn’t a door that closes, it opens. It opens and you go through it”. Besides, he figures he’ll be back with Christ on the Day of Resurection, which fundamentally is why I can’t consider myself too religious. I believe the dead stay dead: further, I believe the dead end up in museums. It doesn’t make any sense to me to think that one day I’ll be hanging around with a Neanderthal.

Besides, I’ve been saying for years that if Heaven’s going to be full of Christian assholes like Jerry Falwell and the fuckers who re-elected George Bush because he shares their ignorance and lack of appreciation for the world’s diversity, then they can have it. They make Hell sound better and better all the time. I mean, everyone I know’s gonna be in Hell – I’d much prefer to spend eternity with my friends.

Besides, fire and brimstone … why would God punish people like that? Some god that would be. ‘Oh worship me, I’m so insecure! If you don’t I’m gonna burn you’. Sounds more like a spoiled brat than the master of the universe. A spoiled brat that any adult would give a good spanking to if they caught him burning people because they wouldn’t kiss his ass. I mean, that’s pretty much what this whole worship thing’s about: bow down, show deference, respect etc.

I’m all in favor of reverence. I think it’s a required part of a healthy psychology. I’ve heard that the praying 5 times a day thing that Muslims do serves to remind them of their humility – the type of humility that I feel when I lay outside on a summer night and look at the stars.

But worship I find unhealthy. I hate deference. (However, if I’d ever met this Pope, or a future one, you’d bet I’d show deference. It’s part of being an ape, you know, showing respect to the grayback). I don’t want to think of myself as better than anyone, or think someone else is better than me. What I’d like is respect for our differences. An appreciation that we each bring something to the table through our diversity.

If the Pope dies this week, I’ll be happy. I’ll be happy because we’ll have some fresh blood in the tired old church. I’ll be happy because it’ll be a media event that I haven’t yet experienced. Why would I morn? I’ve already said that doesn’t make any sense for anyone familar with Catholiscim (and the fact that Catholics still do morn reveals that deep down we all know it’s bullshit). The Pope’s had a good run – and he’s earned his eternal rest. I can’t say I’ll miss him because I don’t know him, but inasmuch as he was a precence in my life as a Catholic child, I am thankful for his example. He taught me about forgiveness. For those reasons when he came to Toronto in 2002, I wanted to go to his Mass. I did, and I have a memory that I’ll always appreciate.

In my own way I will pray for the Pope – but it will be a prayer of thanks, and a prayer of godspeed.

Again, Star Trek (this vast PR machine for technology) provides the model of tech as an enhancement to the quality of life. That is certainly my attitude toward it, reared as I was on it’s philosophy. But, it’s also in line with 20C sci-fi speculation, and here Greg Bear is the best promoter of quality-of-life technology. His future is the one I hope and expect to live in. But, as I want to say, his fiction itself is a 20C vision, and the 20C was delusional.

Before 2050, we’ll speak no more of “‘isms” and academic critics will have discredited themselves. I think Bear’s anticipation of Thinkers is spot on – becoming safe, kind, controlled, and respected authorities, on subjects which will be too complex for humans to fully master. The authority-human is too subject to bias and the whims of our genetic nature. The idea that we’d sell our souls to machines and that they’ll take over the world is an example of the mental illness of the 20C, a projection of our negative tendencies, rather than a sensible viewpoint. It reflects the 20C’s affair with violence, rather than a reasonable expectation. The 21C will recognize people as people as fundamentally good, rather than the 20C’s view that people were essentially shit. That negative view is everywhere in the ‘isms and has produced so many dogmatically angry and disagreeable people, who want to perpetuate the 20C’s cycles of violence. While the ‘isms articulated the nastiness we’re capable of, giving us a language to understand what we need to avoid in ourselves, beyond that they aren’t helpful, and we can’t expect the rest of the century to consists of more refined and better articulated views of our bastardry. I would think that the future will instead build on ‘quality of life’ and focus it’s attention on articulating the good things about life, helping us become good people, as opposed to beating us over the head with our shames.

This is much more easier to say now that it would have been a month ago, even two weeks ago, which was Christmas Day, of ‘joy to the world’ propaganda. We’re living through this historic moment of global consciousness, we’re everyone is talking about the tsunami, and rebuilding, and giving, and the distribution of wealth. The interview on The Current this past week on charity was really great and added to my sense of embarrassment over my actions on Wednesday. People do care about others, politicians do need to wake up to the sense of community among human beings. I suddenly do have a sense that 2005 will be a remarkable, even revolutionary year. The revolution may come at some later point, but historians could look to this year as its beginning. Since researching chronologies again last month, I’ve been taken with the Mayan problem – the well known fact that their long-count chronology ends in December 2012. One of the interpretations I read was that it would signal a change in human consciousness, as I don’t believe in the end of the world. I’d hate to think that there’s an asteroid out there with a Winter Solstice due date in 7 years. I’d think they’d have found that sucker by now. Of course, perhaps that’s the date of a nuclear war, and another environmental catastrophe …. an earthquake that devastates Central America?

Whatever, I’d like to think that we will find ourselves living in a kinder world in seven years, precipitated by the momentum initiated the past two weeks. 2005 is already supposed to be devoted to the reduction of poverty, as the letter from Bill Gates and Bono published last weekend in The Globe and Mail attested. The tsunami disaster has redefined the world’s problems, as did 9/11. Bush and oil and Iraq has been trivialized by a certain degree, and the global community reacts, the stirring of world government and culture are here.

From yesterday’s journal entry:

According to the records, it occurred at 7.58pm our time last night, which was a little after midnight local time. They keep saying it????s the largest earthquake in the world in 40 years – Susan Mernit’s blog quotes somebody saying that it even disrupted the earth????s rotation. I am typing this on Michelle????s laptop in the kitchen, with the tv on Newsworld, which is broadcasting BBC World, which is reporting on the earthquake…scenes of devastation, mud, ruin, ect. More than 11,000 people dead.Earlier this week, I was reading Goethe????s autobiography, and he talked about the Lisbon Quake of 1755, and how it made him question the reality of God. Whenever you read about the development of deism and atheism in the 18th Century Enlightenment, they speak of that earthquake. Here, in 2004 is our version. The difference is though, that without our communications tech, we would only hear about this disaster months from now, and by then with inaccuracy and embellishment.

This Earthquake follows exactly a year after the one that levelled Bam in Iran. From Wikipedia:

In December 26, 2003 at 1:56 AM UTC (5:26 AM local time) Bam Citadel — ‘the biggest adobe structure of the world’ — and most of the city of Bam proper were devastated by an earthquake. The USGS estimated its magnitude as 6.6 on the Richter scale. The BBC reported that ‘70% of the modern city of Bam’ was destroyed. The total death toll was given as 41,000 on January 17 but the latest estimate from Teheran has halved previous estimates to 26,271 deaths. An additional 10,000 – 50,000 were reported injured (this number is very uncertain, the morst appairing number is 30,000, which may have originated from an early Reuters report. The Iranian authorities does not seem to have given any injured quote). According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, the old Bam Citadel was ‘leveled to the ground’.”

For a while I subscribed to the USGS’ earthquake alerts, which taught me that earthquakes occur everyday somewhere in the world. So far today, there have been 139 earthquakes. Many of these are aftershocks from yesterday’s mega.

The following is a response to Jennifer McMackon’s question, “What do you mean when you say ‘…in today’s world, artists can’t afford the luxury of being insignificant…’ ? What makes art significant? What hampers the significance of art? And also why is it (insignificance) a luxury – what makes insignificance so expensive we can’t afford it?” Those questions were to earlier comments I left on the Zeke’s Gallery website regarding the posting Is the Horse Dead Yet? – Timothy

——————-

Luxury, in the sense that I meant it, is that which is not required, but is something that comes about when the basics are in place. I was reading Hume last night on how luxury is a dependable motivator – at least it was so from his 18th Century Scottish perspective. But culture – our work as artists – has always been a bit of a luxury. Once you got the food and shelter thing down, you can afford to use your time to think and create pretty things to trade later.

I realize that the present grant system the protests are trying to maintain is partially there so rent and food can be taken care of allowing the acquisition of the luxury of time. Here, ‘luxury of time’ can be defined as “useful through emptiness” – free time, empty of needing to be used otherwise (for survival), allowing it to be used to think and create.

Art has for most of its history had a certain practical significance but its uselessness (empty of meaning which would define it as necessary for survival) has made it luxurious. The wealthy collector spending a few million for an object or wall hanging today when the money (which should be understood as nothing more than a quantification of the planet’s material resources) could have been put to better use, signals status, and by definition makes the object a luxury.

The statement in question was in part my way of agreeing with Chris [Hand, of Zeke’s Gallery]’s point that collectors are willing to spend big bucks for American works – as Nicolas Bourriaud (a fave of mine) has said nicely – ‘they’re buying a signature’ and not much else – while Canadian artists continue to be overlooked by both the international and internal markets. Of course, as AA Bronson has pointed out above [in previous comments to the post this is a reponse to], there are exceptions which can make the thought of being ignored seem ridiculous. However, I don’t think it is a far-fetched thing to say. The Ken Danby show which opened earlier this month got coverage on the CTV 11.30 news and the show itself on CBC evening news a few days later. (Bronson’s show last year at the Power Plant got neither). And while Danby may seem to be an example of interest in a contemporary Canadian artist by the internal market, the point I’m trying to make is of all the openings held week after week, month after month – how often to do you see television news cameras, except at those openings by those few who have managed through luck and circumstance, to rise to the top of the hierarchy, those whose names are known, so that collectors would want to buy their signature for top dollar?

Please spare me counter-arguments based on the idea that television and the media in general shouldn’t mater. They do matter, and our absence from being represented on it means something. [2004.11.28 7.05pm – Of course, there’s always Zed, but I think the point still stands – Tim].

In saying that artists can’t afford the luxury of being insignificant, the idea is that the Canadian art scene, as I know it, doesn’t seem to care about success, as it’s traditionally understood. Instead it is actively pursuing the development of a theory of failure, which seems to be both misguided and self-destructive by design. Artists are choosing to be insignificant because they have the luxury of doing so. They have the luxury of doing so because of their perceived dependency on the granting agencies, and they are full of socialist ideologies preventing them from wanting to participate within the capitalist system.

I used to be as decidedly ideological about socialism as the rest, but we have to face the fact the capitalism is here for a long haul. There’s simply too much momentum behind it that without a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions the system won’t change soon. At best, we can use the system to accomplish socialist objectives, but we can’t replace it. The Canadian system of socialized programs and free market capitalism works, but it isn’t perfect, as recent obsessions over health care show. The Council’s effort to embrace the market as the real arbiter of value and to encourage artists to put more consideration into their career by concentrating on shows doesn’t strike me as such a bad idea. It seems like it’s worth a try.

We need to ask, why is capitalism, a system whose faults are glaringly obvious to those who can think, so popular? I’ve just said that the market is the arbiter of value, and it is. Now, I’m not a neo-con by any means, I don’t believe in talk of invisible forces, but before artschool I studied anthropology, so I understand the market as the space by which we trade our objects, our goods. Nicholas Bourriaud is the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; a centre modeled on the idea of the market in Marrakech. The idea being that you have lots of exhibitions where you chose to show interest in, and interact with artists as you would a merchant – communicating in a way so that you are ‘sold’ on the work, or you tell them their price is too high and move on to something else. In art, in luxury, in anything, it’s only worth something if somebody wants it. Hume’s line of thinking was that because people usually want luxurious items, they will work to obtain them. I mean, we’re living in North America because four centuries ago, Europe had an unhealthy obsession with gold, which I consider worthless because I have no particular desire to own any.

The debate over artist-run centres and funding changes are focusing on the idea that artists and artist-run centres are engaged in research and publication, as if they were scientific – AA’s example above. I guess this means they are supposed to be creating the language of a future market – creating the interest so that people will want to own either this work, or work like it, in the future. AA’s definition of success above is that his work is the collections of various big-name institutions. The market of the international institutions bought the work. And that was only made possible through the combined efforts of many people, critics and artist-run centres who were operating in a different time. I think it’s fair to say that if AA were 25 today, he wouldn’t get anywhere.

People don’t want our shit, they want Manzoni’s, because he had critics who were ready to embrace the possibility his ideas represented and communicated that, so that he made it into art history and we take his work seriously. Critics in the traditional media rarely review artist-run centres. When they do, they are usually uncritical, but instead are full of praise because they don’t want hurt any feelings. Friends review friends. We always want to be able to look someone in the eye so we don’t tell them when they suck. In science – peer reviewed journals keep the crap out. They aren’t afraid to tell others when they suck. Scientists develop enough self-critical awareness to know when to avoid wasting someone’s time, which I consider the worst thing you can do as an artist. Of course, that itself is a can of worms – I’d like to think that it’s the critics job to help us know when our time is being wasted or not, and while highly subjective, criticism is based on the idea that subjective response is predictable. If you want to adopt the idea that artist-run centres are presentations of zeitgeist and trend research, then you have to be happy when someone dismisses the work.

As Churchill said about democracy, capitalism may seem to be the worst system except for the others that have been tried. As intelligent citizens, we must accept the capitalist system and work within it to make it work for us. We must be engaged with our society, or society will screw us over, as it is doing. We’re all supposed to be upset about the CC changes -we’re having these debates -but it has merited only a brief mention on the CBC website. Again, another example of traditional media’s obsolescence. But also an example of how the editors of the nation’s news don’t consider what we’re doing newsworthy. We are insignificant. We will continue to be insignificant – the fantasy that we might be able to live off our work as artists elsewhere, (or further up the ladder, by those who began climbing in different times), will continue to be a fantasy as long as we continue to alienate ourselves.

Believing the status quo is fine is a sign of conservatism. I want to be recognized by this society as valuable for what I am as a cultural worker, and not be forced into the humiliating economic position that three-grand grants are supposed to be worth pursuing. How about 50 grand a year grants? How about treating artists like doctors, and giving them a salary so they aren’t forced into the nonsense of academia, if they are so valuable to society, and if socialism is really worth pursuing in this case? What clerk in any corporation is asked to work for free and support themselves with a menial, or infrequent part-time job on the side? I know, there are interns, but interns usually have some money behind them allowing them to do that, with the expectation they will be fully employed one day. And the money supporting interns is usually inherited, is from a livable grant, or is a student loan which they’re supposed to pay off later. A system of perpetual internship, as the art world seems to be, is broken and needs fixing.

The expectation that as cultural workers-and-thinkers we have to work a paying job as well as pursue our careers as cultural workers-and-thinkers, and go through the grant-lottery so that we might be able to take some ‘time-off’ is unfair, and is only perpetuated by the myth of the starving artist and the fact that artists through behavior and attitude have alienated themselves from public sympathy, so what’s news for ‘us’ is not ‘for them’. Do you really want to live the rest of your life this way?

So, I’m torn between wanting to have money in the bank because a collector is willing to give me some in return for something I made, or because s/he was taxed so that the government can give it to an agency, so that my peers (who I can’t criticize lest they develop a negative bias) can in turn deem me worthy. And even if they do deem me worthy, the funds being limited may mean that the process of filling out forms was pointless. The Right hate taxes because they would prefer the first model – the collector choosing to support me – is better than the second, where the government gives ‘their’ money to things which they don’t agree with. Obviously we need a better understanding of taxes, but this current animosity, and the reasons the CC has limited funds, is partially because artists have adopted a position where they believe being offensive is a measure of success.

Artists may have the right to offend the Right Wing but we need more sincere effort of explanation and less intellectual posturing which assumes attitudes of superiority. Lets also consider the following: how many of us got into the arts because it was cool – going along with that concept’s fifty year history of pissing off the establishment? How many of us, in turn, got into the arts because we wanted to bring beauty to the lives of ourselves and others? Even within the art world, it seems, people are motivated by selfishness (the cool right) and by compassion (the beautiful left).

Ultimately, I think, I’d like to see artists embrace the 21st Century rather than continue to romanticize the late 20th. It is not fair to think that the Canada Council’s programs, nor our whole artworld infrastructure, as sustainable as anything else within the current system manifested by its bureaucracies. By all accounts, today’s world system is not sustainable. We can’t count on our future being the same as it has been. The world ten years from now will be in the process of cleaning up the mess of the past 40 including the Republican disaster of our present.

Within any bureaucracy, change only comes in response to problems. The happy-go lucky vagueness of a system gets increasingly tied down until policy is so rigid it becomes inhuman. That describes a process where the present emerges out of shortsighted decisions, rather than envisioning a future and making decisions based on its goal. I assume that the current petition is based on the idea that the CC is being shortsighted, which is a lot to assume since the Council engaged in a process of consultation, and tried to engage the Canadian art community. But it is shortsighted of artists to assume things are fine as they are.

Envisioning a future is a process that on the one hand can give our country a patriated constitution, Bill of Rights, and Universal Health Care, but it can also create fascism. The fascist history of the last century seems to have created a fear that ‘vision’ is the same as ‘ideology’, and prompts talk, as John Ralston Saul points out, of ‘inevitability’. The current fashion of equating vision with ideology has encouraged our infamous shortsightedness, as we’re afraid to look past the horizon, and continue with band-aid solutions to larger systemic problems. Since artists are the ones this society trains and educates to envision, we should at least be trying to fulfill that role instead of poeticizing failure and the abject, considering offense a success, and only mobilizing when the Canada Council wants to modify its bureaucracy. The envisioning I see in contemporary art seems to be more or less based on “look at me” than inspiring people that life is worth living and that a better future is worth working for. The best art wakes people up to what is possible, not the brilliance of your ego.

So, what I meant by that statement is this: artists are ignorable because they are ignoring society. Ignoring society is a luxurious position. It’s what the whole idea of the ivory tower is about. But in order to demand more respect for ourselves, we need to be respectful to begin with. By being insignificant, the government can screw us over with ‘chump change’. By becoming significant, collectors will want to buy our work, and we can have better lives. We can become significant by producing work that people actually like, and not by asking for their continual indulgence. Collectors will be more responsive to work people like, because as eBay has shown, people will buy any crap touched by celebrity. Take Canadian literature – anybody ever heard of a girl named Atwood? It’s not like she sold out; my copy of The Handmaid’s Tale has study questions appended to it.

If we don’t want to be dependent on collectors, we need the government to take us more seriously. But that won’t happen unless the public in general takes us more seriously. And that won’t happen until we stop being assholes be treating everyone who disagrees with us as simply conservative, instead of trying to be convincing. The real conservatives are the ones who won’t let themselves be convinced, who prefer ‘golden age’ scenarios to the reality of an ever changing world.