Andrew Sullivan writes about Barack Obama (via Richard Florida’s blog):
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
A slight young man who was considered a god king 3329 years ago when he died. With a long narrow skull which some people make out to be part of an ancient alien-worship cult, but that’s another story. He lies in his box for those thirty centuries while the world slowly turns into airplanes, nuclear weapons and the idiocies of television. Three thousand two hundred and forty-four years after his death, English colonials raid the tomb and use hot knives to remove the famous golden mask, glued to his face. Media frenzy ensues. A boy-king legend in born. King Tut enters the vernacular.
NOW
A shriveled leather prop for Egyptian tourist revenue.
Event InfoName:FORUM – Paradise Lost: Romanticism’s Return
Tagline: with Max Allen, GB Jones, Katherine Lochnan & John Potvin
Host: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Type: Music/Arts – Performance
Time and PlaceDate: Thursday, November 1, 2007
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: The Power Plant
Street: 231 Queens Quay West
City/Town: Toronto, ON
From the glam rock band Scissor Sisters to Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, contemporary culture is infatuated with ecstatic, anguished decadence. Responding to Paul P.’s interests in the dandyism of writer Marcel Proust and painter James McNeill Whistler, this forum considers the resurgence of romanticism, touching on issues of artist relationships and personae, 19th Century portraiture, pornography’s infiltration of visual culture, and images of desire and loss.
Chaired by Max Allen, producer/host of CBC’s IDEAS, speakers include GB Jones, artist/musician whose work appeared with Paul P.’s on the cover for The Hidden Camera’s The arms of his ‘ill’; Katherine Lochnan, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario and curator of ‘Turner, Whistler, Monet’ which toured to Tate Britain and Musée d’Orsay; and John Potvin, author of Bachelors of a Different Sort whose research concerns the male body and intimacy in Victorian and Edwardian culture.
Noam Chomsky participated in a Q&A at Ryerson University in 1988, related to his delivery of the 1988 CBC Massey Lectures. He was interviewed by a panel made up of David Frum (of the ‘axis of evil’ speech-writing fame), Stuart McLean (of the Vinyl Cafe), Peter Worthington (then editor of the Ottawa Sun), Kevin McMann and Margaret Daley.
Take the emphasis on professional sports. It sounds harmless but it really isn’t. Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You’re supposed to cheer for your home team. Just to mention something from personal experience – I remember, very well, when I was I guess, a high school student – a sudden revelation when I asked myself why am I cheering for my high school football team. I don’t know anybody on it, if I met anybody on it we’d probably hate each other. You know, why do I care if they win or if some guy a couple blocks away wins? And then you can say the same thing about the baseball team or whatever else it is. This idea of cheering for your home team -which you mentioned before – that’s a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power. And it’s a very dangerous thing. And I think it’s one of the reasons it gets such a huge play. Or . . . let’s move to something else. The indoctrination that’s done by T.V. and so on is not trying to pile up evidence and give arguments and so on. It’s trying to inculcate attitudes. I mentioned a couple of cases but there are a lot more. Let’s take, say, the bombing of Libya. Why did the American public support the bombing of Libya? Well, the reason is that there had been a very effective, and careful, and intense inculcation of racist attitudes about Arabs. Anti-Arab racism is the one form of racism in the United States that’s considered legitimate. I mean, plenty of people are racist, but you don’t like to admit it. On the other hand, with regard to anti-Arab racism you admit it openly. You read a journal like, say, The New Republic, and the kinds of things that they say about Arabs . . . if anyone said them about Jews you’d think you were reading (Der Stern). I’m not joking. And nobody notices it because anti-Arab racism is so profound. There are novels that have a form of anti-Arab racism that’s hair-raising. The same is true of television shows and so on and so forth. An image has been created – the media are part of this, not all – of the Arab terrorist lurking out there ready to kill us. And against that background you could bomb Libya and people would cheer. Recall how effective that was, remember what was happening in 1986, there are a lot of measures of how effective this is. Remember that in 1986 when this happened the tourism industry in Europe was virtually wiped out because Americans were afraid to go to Europe, where incidentally, objectively, they would be about a hundred times as safe as in any American city. That’s no joke. But they were afraid to go to Europe because they got these Arab terrorists out there trying to kill us. Now, that was not from New York Times editorials, that was from a whole array of television and novels and soap operas and a mass of symbolism and so on and so forth and that’s effective. The anticommunist hysteria is developed that way too. The communists are out there ready to kill us – who are the communists? – I don’t know, they’re out there ready to kill us. This is introduced by the kinds of symbolism that T.V. is good at, and cheap novels are good at and so on and that’s important. These are critical means of indoctrination it’s just that I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about the more intellectual side.
From The End of Virtuous Albion, (on the British National Character), by Theodore Dalrymple (originally published in the New Criterion, 1 September 2005):
On walking through the hospital in which I formerly practiced, I came across the husband of a patient of mine who had always accompanied her to her appointments. He was sitting down and waiting to be called for an examination. He was much thinner than I had seen him before, and he was so jaundiced that he was almost orange in color. At his age, this could mean only one thing: hepatic secondaries in the liver, and fast-approaching death.
I passed the time of day with him, and wished him and his wife well, though I knew that he was dying, he knew that he was dying, and he knew that I knew that he was dying.
“We’ll just have to do the best we can” he said.
Indeed, he died two weeks later. There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life.
I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary–a claim they would never have made for themselves–but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.
While Kate Blanchette in armour and on horseback, with long red hair flowing from her wigged scalp, looking a good twenty years younger than her supposed age of 55 (which in 16th Century terms is a miracle) is visually resplendent, it captures nothing of the woman who wrote Monsieur’s Departure.
Queen Elizabeth on horseback at the
1588 Battle of the English Chanel (2007)
——————————————————–
Queen Elizabeth Playing the Lute, (1576)
by Nicholas Hilliard
On Monsieur’s Departure
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.
– Queen Elizabeth I
_____________
“Monsieur” is identified in two MSS as the duke of Anjou, who withdrew from marriage negotiations in 1582, and in one MS as Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex, whose long-lived affection for Elizabeth ended in a rebellion that resulted in his execution on a warrant signed by Elizabeth. (source)
To get the subject of Women’s Liberation over with – I support it, of course, because women are second-class citizens, as they are saying energetically and competently in many countries. It can be said that they are succeeding, if only to the extent they are being seriously listened to. All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: ‘I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways.’ This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by this who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. I don’t think Women’s Liberation will change much though – not because there is anything wrong with its aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.
But this novel [The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being the theme of ‘She is unfeminine’, ‘She is a man-hater’. This particular reflex seems indestructible. Men – and many women, said that the suffragettes were de-feminized, masculine, brutalized. There is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe this reaction from men – and some women. A lot of women were angry about The Golden Notebook. What women will say to other women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing they will say aloud – a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man says: You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are unmanning me. It is my belief that any woman who marries, or takes seriously in any way at all, a man who uses this threat, deserves everything she gets. For such a man is a bully, does to know anything about the world he lives in, or about its history…
[…]
This business of seeing what I was trying to do – it brings me to the critics, and the danger of evoking a yawn. This sad bickering between writers and critics, playwrights and critics: the public have got so used to it they think, as of quarreling children: ‘Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again.’ Or: ‘You writers get all the praise, or if not praise, at least all that attention- so why are you so perennially wounded?’ And the public are quite right. For reasons I won’t go into here, early and valuable experiences in my writing life gave me a sense of perspective about critics and reviewers … It is that writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself who has seen what one is reaching for, and who judges you only by whether you have matched up to your aim or not. I have never yet met a writer who, faced at last with that rare being, a real critic, doesn’t lose all paranoia and become gratefully attentive – he has found what he thinks he needs. But what he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.
It is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they purport to provide – and for which writers so ridiculously and childishly yearn.
This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training is in the opposite direction.
It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, ‘places’, ‘streams’, stars – and still in many places, stripes. This horse-race mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z had shown himself as better than Writer A.’ From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief – though this is not the place to develop this – and the talents every child has, regardless of his official ‘IQ’, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
The other things taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply,
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already molded by a system, he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further molding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.
These children who have spent years inside the training system becomes critics and reviewers, and cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for – imaginative and original judgment. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking – the climate of opinion. They are like litmus paper. They are wind gauges – invaluable. They are the most sensitive of barometers of public opinion. You can see changes of mood and opinion here sooner than anywhere except in the political field – it is because these are people whose whole education has been just that – to look outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authority figures, to ‘received opinion’ – a marvelously revealing phrase.
It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’
Like every other writer I get letters all the time from young people who are about to write theses and essays about my books in various countries – but particularly in the United States. They all say: ‘Please give me a list of the articles about your work, the critics who have written about you, the authorities.’ They also ask for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important, amounting to a dossier, like an immigration department’s.
These requests I answer as follows: ‘Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to a write a thesis – and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you – then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black.’
‘Dear Writer’ – they reply. ‘But I have to know what the authorities say, because if I don’t them, my professor won’t give me any marks.’
This is an international system, absolutely identical from the Urals to Yugoslavia, from Minnesota to Manchester.
The point is, we are all so used to it, we no longer see how bad it is. I am not used to it, because I left school when I was fourteen. There was a time I was sorry for this, and believed I had missed out on something valuable. Now I am grateful for a lucky escape.
[…]
You might be saying: This is an exaggerated reaction, and you have no right to it, because you say you have never been part of the system. But I think it is not at all exaggerated, and that the reaction of someone from outside is valuable simply because it is fresh and not biased by allegiance to a particular education.
But after this investigation, I had no difficulty in answering my own questions: Why are they so parochial, so personal, so small-minded? Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole? Why is their interpretation of the word critic always to find fault? Why are they always seeing writers in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other … simple, this is how they are trained to think. That valuable person who understands what you are doing, what you are aiming for, and give you advice and real criticism, is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system; it may be a student just beginning, and still in love with literature, or perhaps it may be a thoughtful person who reads a great deal, following his own instinct.
I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: ‘There is only way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down – even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written – and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this – are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book or one author means that you are badly taught – you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people’.
Chasing Transcendence: The Self – Oct 16, 2007
The Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture Series
Bas C. van Fraassen
Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
Whenever we reflect upon ourselves, we quickly end up in difficulty. As the philosopher Wittgenstein quipped, “I am not a thing, but I am not nothing.” The Transcendent Self is not just a myth – but it is precisely in myths that it can be understood. By portraying human beings in the company of gods, myths express what is true about the Self and our place in nature.
640 480 Grand Gestures
Panel Discussion at Trinity Square Video
Saturday October 13, 2007 – 2 PM
401 Richmond Street West, Suite #376
Join 640 480 members Jeremy Bailey, Shanan Kurtz, Philip Lee, and Jillian Locke for a panel discussion about their current exhibition, Grand Gestures, on Saturday October 13, at 2 PM.
Reflecting on the rapid obsolescence of video technology, Grand Gestures memorializes and commemorates the vain attempts we make at preserving our memories.
People make ‘home movies’ in order to create permanent reminders of moments they might otherwise forget. More often than not, it is the video itself that replaces the actual memories, and it is only through this medium that moments can be (re)experienced at all. Pushing at the possibilities of video as a memorial object, Grand Gestures consists of three linked projects – installations at TPW, TSV, and in public spaces along Queen St West. Each project uses the aesthetics of public memorials and museums to discuss the preservation of video and its inherent value system.
Leaks, woes a smudge on Crystal’s sparkle
VAL ROSS
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
October 3, 2007 at 1:00 AM EDT
Good thing it was a dry summer. The new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto’s most talked-about new edifice, leaks.
At least, it did leak. Water penetrated the north end of the long window of the C5 restaurant, and puddles have appeared near windows on the third and fourth floors.
The ROM’s CEO, William Thorsell, pushed to open the new Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystal and the rest of the renovated ROM on June 1. As construction accelerated, the contractors responsible for installing the Crystal’s cladding system warned that temporary seams around windows might leak. In August, they mopped up and repaired the problems.
As winter approaches, fingers are crossed that there will be no more puddles, and that the Crystal’s cladding, designed to prevent it from turning into an avalanche-maker, will function as well in cold reality as it does in theory. But it’s clear, four months into the Crystal’s life, the new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.
An unveiling concert in June shows the Crystal in Toronto. Its new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.
Far more daunting are the problems of mounting exhibits in the strange new spaces, ensuring public safety and budgeting for the new reality.
There are rumours that the Crystal’s oddly shaped, difficult-to-access windows have increased window-cleaning costs by $200,000, a figure ROM’s executive director of capital development and facilities, Al Shaikoli, disputes.
“But it is considerable,” he admitted. “In the old days, our window-cleaning budget was next to nothing.”
Safety issues are a surprise. “We didn’t predict human behaviour,” Mr Shaikoli said. On the June weekend of its grand, all-night opening, ROM staffers discovered that, particularly after the bars closed, visitors seemed more interested in the Crystal as a playground than as architecture. Staff were alarmed to see people crawling out on windows slanting over Bloor Street, apparently testing their strength.
“Mind you, these galleries were naked spaces,” Mr. Shaikoli said. “Once they’re filled with artifacts, people will be more respectful.” Display cases will soon be installed in the paths of future adventurers.
Another discovery was a trail of footprints most of the way up a fourth-floor wall that rises at a 30-degree angle. “Probably a kid took a run at it,” speculates Dan Rahimi, director of gallery development. Baseboards and stainless steel barriers are being installed to signal that a wall is a wall, even if it’s not on the straight and narrow.
“One of our major bugbears was that William wanted everything open and accessible,” says Janet Waddington, assistant curator of paleontology. “But you can’t do that – the Toronto public is extraordinarily destructive.”
Even in the old dinosaur galleries, says Ms. Waddington, people used to reach across railings to pat the prosaurolophus bones. In the ROM’s Crystal dinosaur gallery, two ancient marine reptile skeletons, a pleiosaur and a mosasaur, have been suspended from an overhanging face of the Crystal (the ceiling is too high), which puts their irreplaceable old bones within arm’s reach. By the time the gallery opens in December, a plinth or base underneath, surrounded with barriers, will keep the public’s hands at bay. “It has been horrendous,” said Ms. Waddington, “but very exciting.”
The problem of installing artifacts in a space with no vertical walls challenged Hiroshi Sugimoto, the first artist to be exhibited in the ROM’s fourth-floor Institute for Contemporary Culture. So, he designed a curving wall 4.3 metres high and 27.5 metres long, fitted with special lighting, to counteract the angular architecture. Total cost to the ROM: about $200,000. The wall was recently removed to make room for a new show of aboriginal contemporary art that opens on Saturday.
Special new display cases have been bought to match the galleries, some with trapezoidal shapes. As well, the renovation has opened the entire building, old and new parts, to more daylight, which risks bleaching museum artifacts. So the museum has acquired special blinds that filter out 96 per cent of ultraviolet light, as well as blackout blinds that block exterior light.
“Daniel didn’t design this building based on the collections,” said Mr. Rahimi. “We had to design the collections to go with the building. We have an aesthetic imperative – partly because the architecture is so strong.”
13 October 2004
I got off at 5, walked to U of T for this lecture I was looking forward to, and quickly found it boring. It put me to sleep. It was all about the fact that radiocarbon dating is rewriting the chronologies complied by Aeagan scholars a hundred years ago, and that one branch of scholarship debates the validity of the other. This is stretched out into a Power Point presentation with the worst graphics and a monotonous delivery punctuated with a English schoolboy’s rhythms. I wanted to say, it wasn’t so bad, I fell asleep because I was tired, but my goodness. I left during question period; I decided that trying to hook up with someone for drinks and conversation wasn’t worth my time.
07 October 2005
Rain today. I awoke near quarter after 11, and have had a quiet day of words. First some writing, then, for the past hour and half, reading. Read a couple of great essays in Northrop Frye’s Divisions on a Ground and the Charles Comfort essay in the book I got from Grandmère’s in August. Almost have the feeling that I’ve got it all figured out and so I’m bored.
Last year I was motivated by what? Trudeau’s example of being a cool Canadian, his enthusiasm for the country, was infectious – this is one the highlights of his legacy for many. I guess it was thinking about Mark Kingwell, then Trudeau, then John Ralston Saul (re-reading Unconscious Civilization) and Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell – questioning why it was these amazing writers and communicators all happen to be Canadian, and how great it was to be part of that culture, one that reminded me of the Scottish Enlightenment. All of this of course, contrasted with the reality of the United States, and all that abysmal writing from France that has infected the intelligentsia of my generation.
Lament for my generation – a year ago I said once to D, thinking of the example of Scotland, ‘we’re all famous in the future, yet none of us know that so we all too busy fighting one another’. I had immense enthusiasm for my generation and our ideas (I guess today I would just say I had immense enthusiasm for my ideas) and D was pessimistic about my optimism. Because of blogs, because of the idea I had for a lecture series …. and then BlogTo came along, K’s reading group – forums to see my optimism play out. The Reading Group is great, no reason to knock it, but the blog thing I’ve become disenchanted with. Because it’s not quite living up to it’s potential. What the guy at Canada25 said to me, about how it’s no different from listening to some guy at a bar … and I couldn’t really disagree with that. That last BlogTo meeting really took the wind of my sails for it – see it as superficial. This is what my generation has to offer? Perhaps a portion of my depression is part realization that I’m always going to have a hard go at it, since I was born at an awkward time – forever experiencing ‘transitional periods’ and surrounded by a generation with small and conventional ambitions. A generation I’ve come to see as very conservative, seeking to emulate their parents, not overcome them. And so, a generation of intelligent people who become disciples to dead thinkers and dead writers, born in another country and in another time, and ignoring the science that truly answers the questions asked by generations. We now know who we are, where we came from, and have a good idea of where we might be going. A generation of Foucault and Baudriallard experts are wearing the wrong clothes for this bus ride.
That being said, I’m enthralled by the writings of a dead Canadian from my grandparent’s generation. Perhaps this is a reflection of my Generation Y sympathies – a generation I’m told (a manifestation of their more apparent conservatism) that gets along more with the grandparents at than with the parents, who are seen to be selfish (the boomers, who I see that way).
I read Saul over the winter, and felt Canadian – saw how my culture and my experience was different from that of the U.S. My enthusiasm became preaching, and I introduced his thinking to the Reading Group. His thinking on our provincial predicament had me reject the art scene and its Artforum desires … most recently exemplified by that quote about October magazine in last week’s Globe and Mail. Talking with E over coffee in the spring, and her asking ‘what’s so compelling about Canadian history?’ and me countering with, ‘what’s so compelling about the American one?’
And now, thoughts of the importance of imagination … which came via Kristeva, but which was articulated by Frye, and picked up again by Saul in his last (prior to Globalism) book. The American one is compelling perhaps because it is the only one we have access too; H goes to L.A. to work with Thomas Crow, whose book explained a lot to me last year. An American story, part of the American imagination. But his book cannot alone explain the problems of contemporary art in Canadian society. And so now, thoughts on the need for a Canadian anthology of art history.
But for me the big break through this year was understanding the imagination. Of seeing how art is all about feeding the imagination, so that our days do not seem meaningless and empty, but part of a larger context. And while it’s easy for me to talk about television as a prosthetic imagination, it is also one that ties society together with a common understanding. Canada’s imagination of itself is not [only] found in a novel – it is found in Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys and Robson Arms … as was said this week on one of the entertainment news shows, pointing out how each show imagines a different region of the country, to introduce the development of a new show set in Toronto.
12 October 2005
Candian hope followed by Canadian dispair. The country had potential and talent, and yet the talent dispairs. Mike Bullard in today’s Globe and Mail, referring to the demise of his tv show last year – here a show doesn’t work and you’re considered a failure, in L.A. it’s no big deal. But Americans are big and forgetful, and this makes them optimistic. Perhaps it also helps to account for how toxic their cultural environment is.
Waves crash on the shoreline of Lake Ontario driven by winds.
Topic: What themes do you see in contemporary Toronto Art?
01. Gareth Bate wrote on Sep 17, 2007 at 4:56 PM
Do you notice any general themes in Toronto art? Any medium or imagery that is particularly prevelant?
02 .Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 18, 2007 at 8:26 PM
Not relevant, but just annoying and utterly useless trends:
1. Birds: especially orioles and finch-like creatures.
2. Deer: to play on the ‘woodsy’ theme alongside the birds.
[Could this be a flash of modern Canadiana?]
3. Neon colours, such as bright magenta, cyan, and yellow.
4. And the act of drawing on walls. Carrie, this one’s for you!
Maybe they are relevant in one way or another; I’m sure they are somehow. But on the surface, the sheer repetitiveness of it all becomes nerve-wracking and a complete turn-off.
03. Gareth Bate replied to Martin’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 5:51 AM
At the queen west art crawl there was an awful lot of picky little pencil drawings. Really precious stuff.
04. Kurt Rostek replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 4:20 PM
I’m seeing a lot of what I would call an almost frivolous if not cartoonish works..with toys, dolls …childlike memorabilia..
05. Stanzie Tooth (OCAD) wrote on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:17 AM
I’ve been seeing alot of micro/ macro stuff- semi-abstract thing based on: diseases, cells- general closeups of bodily fluids, etc.
06. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:37 AM
i see that martin has hurt my feelings 🙁
07. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 3:27 PM
Hence, art criticism.
😉
08. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 4:41 AM
I’m going to fight you
09. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 6:03 AM
Bring it on, dear.
I’m ready!
10. Robert Farmer wrote on Sep 21, 2007 at 12:15 PM
let’s cover it in resin!
11. Alex Mcleod replied to Robert’s post on Sep 23, 2007 at 10:17 AM
only photo collages though
12. Rachel McRae replied to Martin’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 9:22 PM
As an artist who works with deer imagery a lot I feel I need to respond.
If the use of deer is a “trend” its one with quite a rich history. Beyond mere “Canadiana,” it recalls symbolic use stretching across a vast track of geography (across all continents except Antarctica and Australia) and time (Paleolithic cave paintings in Cave Trois Frères in southern France feature a “shaman” figure crowned with horns.) The deer figures prominently in heraldry internationally, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Celtic.. A whole mass of religious/cultures groups use the deer as a symbol. Deer appear frequently in classic/neo-classic still lifes and imagery of the hunt…
An animal of such widespread dispersement, a rich food source (and thus economic importance) is bound to become a weighty cultural symbol. Though you yourself may not hunt deer, wear deer skin, engage directly with the animal in any way, you do have a certain connection with it. You’re talking about “art,” practicing I can only assume, and art’s connection with the deer-as-symbol is vast and dense.
Any practice with history must dialogue with its past. (Otherwise, I would argue; it is not art. If I may express a personal opinion, art becomes art when it is engaged with its historical cannon. Otherwise it is something distinct. That being said, engagement is not synonymous with compliance or agreeance.)
(With all due respect, I wouldn’t apply the term “useless” so lightly.)
13. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Rachel’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 10:34 PM
So, why is deer imagery so ‘important’ (or rampant) in Toronto NOW?
14. Therese Cilia (OCAD) wrote on Sep 28, 2007 at 11:19 AM
I’m getting the impression from this board that themes and trends in art is generally a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. To me, trends are inevitable and unavoidable. We’re all questioning the same universe and have been since we’ve been on this planet. We’re going to be talking about our past and our present, we’re looking at the same things and being influenced by the same things – that’s culture! We’re seeing birds, butterflies, deer, and micro/macroscopic life because they’re HERE, and so are we. If the work is ‘authentic’, not just following a trend but actually being it and questioning it, (and I know we can all realize the difference, it’s what makes a good painting a good painting or not), then birds, cells or deer – it all doesn’t matter.
As an aside, I’d like to say that the Ann Hamilton lecture was EXCITING. It actually made me a little nostalgic to be in school again and be surrounded in that atmosphere. If you’re a graduate, you know what I mean?
I love that when I hear or read Ann Hamilton, I get the feeling that her work and her voice I can never quite grasp, but am so close to getting. She’ll say or do something really profound that leaves you wanting more because you can never quite keep it all in your head. If that makes any sense at all. I love it.
15. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) wrote on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:54 PM
Deer “heads” was reintroduced into the contemporary International art scene when much of the critical discourse centred on the Archive and the museums/institutions role of dominating/destroyer/preserver of nature…and it’s also retro–like Victorian riffed wallpaper…what goes around comes around, and it finally hit Toronto
YOU CANNOT DENY OSMOSIS
popular motifs develop organically not necessarily meaning one is “following” a trend, especially if each artist has a different critical approach and style
deer heads and birds and neon is what will mark this generation of paintings as opposed to cubic abstraction or big eyed paintings, etc. is that a bad thing? no…seriously…everyone in TO working with the same motifs should put out and imprint with essays championing the varying reasons behind the use of neon/birds/dear…with Martin writing the forward 😉
seriously…it will give Martin a topic to lecture future OCAD students about
AND AS FAR AS DRAWING ON WALLS:
for me, Dood was a mere momentary interruption of the usual really bad community arts practice with the synthesis of participatory culture theory made manifest in the physical and digital realms
😉
16. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Robert’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:59 PM
covering it in resin was sooo last years TIFF 😉
it made the 3 or so resinless paintings really stand out
i swear thats the only reason I go to TIFF, is to see which trend has exhausted itself into implosion
17. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Carrie’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 1:02 PM
we could call the book “deers, birds, neon OH MY!”
18. Gareth Bate replied to Rachel’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 9:31 PM
Can you post a link to your work?
19. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Carrie’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 11:30 PM
“I’ll foreword anytime!” says the next up-and-coming art historian/editor/anthologist. I have big plans ahead, Carrie…
;P
20. Liz Pead wrote on Oct 4, 2007 at 12:19 PM
As a landscape painter, I find this thread really interesting.
Deer and birds are often around me, but like people in city scapes, I omit them in the landscape.
There’s something tacky about portraying deer and other animals in art – I grew up with string-art and velvet paintings in New Brunswick. Jacking deer was a passtimje, but also a necessity for some as a source of a winter’s worth of meat.
Depicting animals, especially by people who grew up in the suburban/ urban experience so often found here in Canada ( not that I’m making any assumtions about any of you and where you grew up!!!) is kind of sweet. I don’t see it any different =than me going up to Algonquin Park every summer and painting my idea of the pretty northern, pristine landscape. It is a potent form of nostalgia that I have for an environment I both remember from my past in New Brunswick surrounded by trees and a form of nostalgia for these natural things which are disappearing very quickly before me.
As for them being trends? Maybe we are reacting more than we know to our envirnomental breaking down…m uch more violently than we can even put into words.
A couple of years ago ( SPring 2006?) Border Crossings mag did a whole issue dealing with Animals, Im going to revisit it and see if it makes any more sense to me now than it did then ( I was finishing my thesis at that point and unless it was hockey or landsacpe it kinda went by me…)
From Robert D. Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth (1996: 4-5):
From the perspective of space, where there is no gravity, there is also no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily objective. Scan the map with the south pole on top and you see the world entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width – and thus its majesty – as it narrows ‘northward’ into the atrophied limb of Central America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness to the top, insufficiently connected to the other continental bodies.
Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable to the emergence of life in countless forms – three quarters of its surface lies within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all ultimately belong, from where human beings acquired their deepest genetic traits. ‘We are all Africans under the skin,’ says anthropologist Christopher Stringer. Africa is nature write large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet, writes:
We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
From Wikipedia: ‘The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin mediterraneus, “inland” (medius, “middle” + terra, “land, earth”). To the ancient Romans, the Mediterranean was the center of the earth as they knew it.’
The Roman Mediterranean is our Pacific. The sea that takes up half the planet, in the middle of the Earth.
William Buzzell: A lot of people move to NYC and end up staying there the rest of their lives, but you haven’t fit that mold.
AJ Fosik: Well, I had an idealized version when I moved to NYC, too; that it would be this great artist community and that there would be so much going on. But NYC is a really, really difficult place for an artist to live. I think that whole mythology of being able to live in NYC as an artist isn’t really relevant anymore. Everyone I know there works 9-to-5 jobs and pays way too much for an apartment and can’t really function creatively.
WB: But you feel that you can function more creatively in places like San Diego or Denver?
AF: I don’t really have to have a real job here, so that’s a big part of it. It’s pretty much the same reason you live in Philly.
WB: But I also started hating NYC towards the end of living there, and not even just in terms of money. I got really burnt out on NYC, and I think you did too.
AF: Definitely. I go to NYC now and there’s lots of things I love about it, but it’s just way too scenstery there. It doesn’t feel like any organic art scene really exists.
WB: I kind of feel that all of our friends there are turning into the cast of Sex and the City.
~
From Journal, 2 August 2007:
The bar was customered by CityTV folk, and I noticed the fellow from the Space station having an afterwork drink. Hanging around Queen & John at 5.30 is a great way I guess to stalk CityTV/MM/Etc personalities. I ate fries and chicken wings since I was in no mood for something healthy. Conversation with N was nice as usual. We went to the opening at Diaz – sculpture – and I wasn’t approached by anybody friendly. That opening more than most reminded me of Sex in the City: the pretentious glamour of standing around drinking bad wine out of plastic cups, as if this is somehow superior to god knows what else. N and I escaped through the emergency exit, which I coincidentally happened to be standing in front of. Walked to the KM opening, which was also dismal.
Art Aloud: The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Lecture Series 2007
In partnership with the Ontario College of Art & Design
The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2007 Lecture Series encourages discussions, dialogue and discourse leading up to the night of event. With participation from local and international artists from various mediums involved in Scotiabank Nuit Blanche these are sure to be lively and thought-provoking conversations.
All Scotiabank Nuit Blanche lectures are free. Admission is first-come, first-served. Space is limited. For more details email: scotiabanknuitblanche@toronto.ca
Thursday September 27
Panel Discussion
6:30-8:30 pm
Ontario College of Art & Design
100 McCaul St
Auditorium, Level 1
How does the twelve-hour duration of Nuit Blanche influence the artistic process, and what is the nature of an event that is impermanent and ephemeral? Featuring local, national and international artists and gallerists, this panel will address urban space, public art and site-specificity.
Moderated by Toronto Star urban issues reporter Christopher Hume.
Panellists include:
Sara Graham: As a Toronto-based artist Sara Graham’s practice centres on explorations of geographic fictions that blur the disciplines of art, architecture, urban design and geography.
Millie Chen: An active member of a number of artist-run organizations, Millie Chen’s practice encompasses collaborative interdisciplinary projects that engage the public and public space.
Adad Hannah: Based in Montreal, Adad Hannah works in video and photography.
Dyan Marie: Artist and gallerist Dyan Marie explores urban issues, ideas and reflections on contemporary cultural experience. Dyan Marie Projects focuses her curatorial and artistic practices on the Lansdowne and Dupont neighbourhood where she lives.
Craig Walsh: Based in Brisbane, Australia, Craig Walsh is primarily interested in hybrid / site-specific projects and the exploration of alternative contexts for contemporary art, often utilizing projection in response to existing environments and contexts.
‘Letters were usually headed with the name of the writer in the nominative and that of the recipient in the dative governed by the greeting, ‘S.D’ or ‘SAL.’ = salutem dat. The fullness of the names and the greeting was in inverse proportion to the intimacy of the correspondents. In familiar letters only the cognomen was used (Cicero, Attico, &c.), but such apruptness in a formal letter was boorish’.
Correct: Tim to Ed Correct: Timothy Charles Comeau to Whom it May Concern
Official or other formal communications should give the full style and titles of both the writer and the recipient, and add other greeting, ‘S.V.B.E.E.Q.V’ or the like.
Correct: Timothy Charles Comeau to The Right Honourable Prime Minster Stephen Joseph Harper, SVBEEQV Incorrect (boorish): Tim to Steve (like, yo!)
In the end, it’s that I don’t take art that seriously anymore. I mean, I appreciate that Chris Hand wrote that ‘blogTo takes art very very seriously’ and that he linked to a bunch of my articles; but lately, having decided not to post about the Power Plant show (at least not the Lignon show) I’ve been scratching my head about it all. As an artist, I know how to take it seriously, to appreciate where artists are coming from, what they are trying to say, what they are interested in and what they are working out in their work. But that leaves it all to me seeming insubstantial when it’s very clearly personal. I’m reminded of William Gibson, two years ago, said on Richardson’s Roundup, describing the webpages that stand out as being ‘highly personal’. (And one then thinks of all the artists websites I see that are really shitty precisely for that reason). And my readings lately have me working out the history of ‘the highly personal’ and I’ve found myself agreeing with Goethe’s assessment that art is something tied to history, and that one needs to understand a history to really appreciate the artwork. What has happened has been an abandonment of historical understanding amongst artists, and it’s doubly worse in Canada because we all act as if our history is uninteresting. As Heather asked, ‘what’s compelling about Canadian history?’ And I asked in turn, ‘what do you find compelling about what you consider compelling?’ or something to that effect, getting at the heart of the matter – ‘what’s compelling about American history?
The Case of MB
On 25 November 2006, a Montreal blogger posts the following on his site. Although many of us know exactly who the characters involved are, because of the subsequent legal action I’ve decided it’s best to remove the names. Our Montreal blogger will be referred to below as MB.
Howdy!
According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.
This might even be a better story than [C].
This was basically a link-out to an article in the National Post which had been published the day before. The article was about A, a car dealer who police claimed was involved with a crime family. Word on the street had it that B was a business partner with A, and that A had stolen paintings from B, as B is a gallery owner. B was actually in business with A’s wife, not A himself.
The subsequent legal action mentioned above was that B sued MB for defamation, because of the above post. Let’s read it again:
According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec.
According the National Post article, A was in business with B, and B tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. This relates to an even older story from 2003, and is of little consequence here. The defamation in question comes about in the following sentence:
Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.
By beginning his sentence with ‘Because of him’ the implication is that he’s referring to the last person named in the previous statement (B) when in fact he’s referring to A. This leads to the legal action, which is initiated in April, when Mr. MB received the first cease-and-desist notification, which apparently asked for the post to be corrected, clarified, or deleted.
My sense is that complying would have been reasonable, except that MB got his back up about it all and ended up deleting his blog. All because of an unclear sentence structure, and the use of the controversy for a relentless self-promotion campaign of interviews with mainstream media organizations.
Fueled by claims of censorship and a lack of free speech, the angle was always that of the little guy being bullied by people with enough money to afford to drag the matter before the courts. This publicity simply exacerbated the situation.
Again, this is simply the result of bad writing, and the real lesson here is not one of censorship, but that one should be clear about one’s references. MB was simply trying to summarize something that had been published by a national newspaper, but in doing so implied not only an association with the party being investigated by police, but the actual offenses supposedly perpetrated by that person. B had every right to ask for the posting to be clarified or deleted.
Email
A book has now been published as a manual for email, and in it’s review, Janet Malcolm quotes the following examples, described as the correspondence between an executive ‘at a large American company in China’ and his secretary:
You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support.
To which the secretary replied:
I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even though I’m your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it’s someone else’s fault.
Her reply was cc’d to everyone in the company. ‘Before long,’ write Malcolm, ‘the exchange appeared in the Chinese press and led to the executive’s resignation’.
I’m glad to see the executive ended up losing his position, not the secretary. But again, this is the result of bad writing. The executive was probably ignorant of the tone he was conveying with his sentences. His use of the word ‘you’ four times, and the condensation of his instructions into two sentences comes across as curt and unfeeling. The secretary reads it as such, and accuses him of being impolite.
The executive, having risen to the top of ‘a large American company’ must be well versed in the technocratic language of our time. His secretary made the reasonable assumption that he had the wherewithal to carry his own keys, and I’m making the assumption that he’s illiterate – not in the sense that he cannot read or write, but in the sense that he’s not conscious of the effect of his (or the) written word. But then again, one email is not enough to go on for that conclusion: he may have been having a bad day, he may have already been angry about something else, he may have had a company wide reputation for being an asshole to begin with and so on.
Another example from the review clearly implies the executive in question is an asshole:
In this case, the secretary spilled ketchup on the boss’s trousers, and he wrote an email asking for the £4 it cost to have the trousers cleaned (the company was a British law firm). Receiving no reply, he pursued the matter. Finally he—and hundreds of people at the firm—received this email:
Subject: Re: Ketchup trousers
With reference to the email below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.
I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.
Having already spoken to and shown your email…to various partners, lawyers and trainees…, they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the £4.
I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon. Jenny.
Considering my subject here is what is conveyed by writing, I want to point out that both of these examples convey that the top of the corporate pyramid is inhabited by less-than-human individuals, both male, and both wanting to defer responsibility to their female underlings. One could have clearly carried his keys, while the other could have clearly afforded to cover the cost of cleaning his pants. It is precisely this type of basic inconsideration which fuels the protests against globalized capitalism.
Do Not Consume
My third example comes from a story reported last spring, in which Health Canada attempted to warn people not to drink the water on certain Native reservations. (I’m disgusted by the need to write that sentence, btw: ‘bad water on native reservations’. What century am I living in?)
Health Canada says it plans to revamp its communication strategy about drinking water in aboriginal communities after finding out that its warning ads are not working.Federal Health Minister Tony Clement said Thursday a study has found that its public service announcements, which come in the form of signs and posters, are not clear or effective.
“You live and learn in these things,” Clement said in Ottawa.
Because it was too hard to write, ‘Don’t drink the water’ (that would have been too human, too unprofessional) the signs were written thus:
Do Not Consume Advisory
‘According to the study,’ (study!) CBC reported, ‘residents did not know if the sign referred to their tap water or if the advisory was just a suggestion’.This links back to the example of the executive in China. Corporate language has to be cold, unfeeling, imprecise, technical. The technical aspect is the most important, because it conveys the delusion that one is scientific, and as John Ralston Saul argued with Voltaire’s Bastards, we live within the social cult of Reason. Everything should be as emotionless as an equation.Saul wrote in The Unconscious Civilization (p. 48-49):
In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning, although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.
(Think of how MB is complaining of being censored, when he apparently couldn’t see how his sentence structure could be so misconstrued).
I would put it this way. Our language has been separated into two parts. There is public language – enormous, rich, varied and more or less powerless. Then there is corporatist language, attached to power and action.
(Do Not Consume Advisory)
Corproratist language itself breaks down into three types. Rhetoric, propaganda and dialect. […] For the moment let’s concentrate on dialects. Not the old-fashioned regional dialects, but the specialized, inward looking verbal mechanisms (I’m avoiding the word language because they are not language; they do not communicate) of the tens of thousands of monopolies of fractured knowledge. These are what I would call the dialects of the individual corporations. The social science dialects, the medical dialects, the science dialects, the linguist dialects, the artist dialects. Thousands and thousands of them, purposely impenetrable to the non-expert, with thick defensive walls that protect each corporation’s sense of importance. […]
The reliance on specialist dialects, indeed the requirement to use [them], has become a universal condition of our contemporary elites. …
But the core of the disease is perhaps to be found in the social sciences. These often well-intentioned, potentially useful false [emp mine] sciences feed the dialects of the public and private sectors. […] Economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitate scientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but above all, through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects. As in business and governmental corporations, the purpose of such obscure language could be reduced to the following formula: obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance.
Obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance: Don’t Drink the Water.
Pullo: ‘They’ll think we’ve gone soft’
Vorenus: ‘Let them. We need time to regain our strength. While they’re fighting over the spoils of the Argosy, we’ll be recruiting men and restoring order.’
Rome (Season 2, ‘Heroes of the Republic’)
———————-
From Karl Polanyi’s, The Great Transformation (1944; p.5-7) with highlights:
The 19C produced a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western Civilization, namely a hundred year’s peace – 1815-1914. Apart from the Crimean War [1853-56] – a more or less colonial event – England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, and Russia were engaged in war among each other for altogether only 18 months. A computation of comparable figures for the preceding two centuries [1600, 1700s] gives an average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each. But even the fiercest of 19C conflagrations, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, ended after less than a year’s duration with the defeated nation being able to pay over an unprecedented sum as an indemnity without any disturbance of the currencies concerned.
This triumph of pragmatic pacifism was certainly not the result of an absence of grave causes for conflict. Almost continuous shifts in the internal and external conditions of powerful nations and great empires accompanied this irenic pageant. During the first part of the century civil wars, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary interventions were the order of the day. In Spain a 100,000 troops under the Duc d’Angoulème stormed Cadiz; in Hungary the Magyar revolutions threatened to defeat the Emperor himself in pitched battle and was ultimately suppressed only by a Russian army fighting on Hungarian soil. Armed interventions in the Germanies, in Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Venice marked the omnipresence of the Holy Alliance. During the second half of the century the dynamics of progress was released; the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Sheriffian empires broke up or were dismembered; China was forced by invading armies to open her door to the foreigner and in one gigantic haul the continent of Africa was partitioned. Simultaneously, two powers rose to world importance: the United States and Russia. National unity was achieved by Germany and Italy; Belgium, Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary assumed, or resumed, their places as sovereign states on the map of Europe. An almost incessant series of open wars accompanied the march of industrial civilization into the domains of outworn cultures or primitive peoples. Russia’s military conquests in Central Asia, England’s numberless Indian and African wars, France’s exploits in Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, Syria, Madagascar, Indo-China, and Siam raised issues between the Powers which, as a rule, only force can arbitrate. Yet every single one of these conflicts was localized, and numberless other occasions for violent change were either met by joint action or smothered into compromise by the Great Powers. Regardless of how the methods changed, the result was the same. While in the first part of the century constitutionalism was banned and the Holy Alliance suppressed freedom in the name of peace, during the other half – and again in the name of peace – constitutions were foisted upon turbulent despots by business-minded bankers. Thus under varying forms of ever-shifting ideologies – sometimes in the name of progress and liberty, sometimes by the authority of the throne and the altar, sometimes by grace of the stock exchange and the checkbook, sometimes by corruption and bribery, sometimes by moral argument and enlightened appeal, sometimes by the broadside and the bayonet – one and the same result was attained: peace was preserved.
This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more unites capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek and Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Munster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the 19C the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian.
The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the 18C, JJ Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty.
After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution is establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.
The bearers of the ‘peace interest’ were, as usual, those who chiefly benefited by it, namely, the cartel of dynasts and feudalists whose patrimonial positions were threatened by the revolutionary wave of patriotism that was sweeping the Continent. Thus, for approximately a third of a century the Holy Alliance provided the coercive force and the ideological impetus for an active peace policy; its armies were roaming up and down Europe putting down minorities and repressing majorities. From 1846 to about 1871 – ‘one of the most confused and crowded quarter centuries of European history’ – peace was less safely established, the ebbing strength of reaction meeting the growing strength of industrialism. In the quarter century following the Franco-Prussian War we find the revived peace interest represented by that new powerful entity, the Concert of Europe.
The assassination of GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR took place on 15 March 710 A.U.C in the Curia of Pompey’s Theatre. This was the temporary meeting place of the Senate, since the favored location, The Curia Hostilla had burnt down and was being reconstructed, which would become known as the Curia Jullia.
The interior of the Curia Julia today (from Flickr)
After the event two thousand and fifty years ago, Cicero wrote to L. Minucius Basilus:
I congratulate you. I am wild with delight. I love you and am watching over your interests. I want you to send me in return your love and an account of what you are doing and of all that is going on.
This was a note sent in excitement to Basilus, who would be killed by one of his slaves the following year, who he had punished with mutilation. Basilus had been a solider under Caesar in Gaul, and expected a province to be given him by the dictator. Caesar instead paid him what must have been a large sum of money, and this soured him against the Tyrant and so he joined the conspiracy.
Two days later (on the 17th) Cicero writes to Brutus and Cassius
I learned yesterday evening from Hirtius that Antony is disposed to play us false, pretending that the hostility of the soldiers and of the mob makes it unsafe for us to stay in Rome. So I have applied for liberae legationes for us, but do not expect to get them and fear the worst. So I think we should retire into exile, as we cannot well resort to force, having no rallying point. Let me know your views and where to meet you.
PS After a second talk with Hirtius I determined to ask leave for us to live in Rome with a guard.
The Roman Mob, which made it unsafe for the Conspirators, had burned the site of the deed, although it is not clear when exactly this took place. The transformation of the Hostilla into the Julia wouldn’t be complete for another fifteen years.
The Addresses of Cicero
Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, (1882-1888)
Cicero announces Octavian, from video series Rome (2007)
This second image is very William Gibson novel; the lone poor artist working away at their craft. Young, beautiful and pragmatic. Eventually, this picture will be updated with timestamps from the 2030s; she’ll be gray-haired, standing in an industrial studio, white walls and everything so clean. The studio will look like a Japanese car factory, and the art will be so big, so expensive.(source) www.audrey-kawasaki.com
I used to say I was born in the wrong century. The way overly dramatic kids claim to be old souls living in the present day, I was convinced I was secretly an impressionist painter, meant more for turn of the century’s demi-monde opulence rather than today’s world of animators, illustrators, and monster movie artists. I didn’t go to art school. I don’t know all the proper techniques. I learned colour theory by doing graffiti, but the story of the graffiti-artist-turned-fine-art-painted has been played out since the mid-’80s. My own life seemed to be working against me. I was convinced I should have been born in 1850.
Then I realized that I was approaching everything wrong. I live in Hollywood, this century’s den of inequity and excess. I have eccentric colourful friends that rival the models of Degas and Renoir, I spend nights at Los Angeles bars that could rival those painted by Monet, and as this is 2007 I have access to neon pink and hot orange that I imagine even Van Gogh wouldn’t know how to utilize. I am a contemporary painter interested in historic themes. There isn’t anything wrong with that. I don’t have any art school loans to pay back. I primarily paint women because I’m tremendously influenced by Klimt – and really focused on beauty.
UPDATE:
When I posted the video on Aug 27th, it had been seen by over 2 million viewers. Twenty-four hours later it had been seen by over 5million, and today it’s clocking in at 9,200,616. This is viral video Ebola.
I think that everyone has missed something important here; she’s actually been pioneering a new art form- a combination of Hindi Ghazal poetry and blank verse. Look at the transcription:
I personally believe that us americans
are unable to do so because osama.
People out there
in our nation
don’t have that,
And I believe that our education
like such as south africa and
such as the Iraq.
everywhere “such as”.
And I believe our education
should help the US
should help the south africa
and the iraq
and the asian countries
so we can build up
our future.
The themes are clear; she’s worried about the way we are reacting to the war on terror, the way Osama Bin Laden still is free, and the way that we are being “educated”. The irony is simply dripping from the last stanza. She was able to deliver this call to revolution absolutely deadpan, cunningly pulling the wool over America’s eyes- and people here have the temerity to mock her intellectual accomplishments? She is the latter-day heir to Rosa Luxemborg- only, without the boathook.
Replies to the video are appearing on YouTube. Comments equating this Teen Miss with the degeneration of the society as whole are flourishing, along with those by hormonal frat boys: “that chick is so SEXY. when i get wit her… i hope she knows where i shoul put it:P” Video responses include this girl who proves she can read cue cards. A brilliant career in network news awaits.
On a more snarky note, this also shows that a ten year old is better at reading cue cards than Amy Goodman.
Richard Morgan, from Black Man (UK) /Th1rte3n (US) (Amazon) pages 87-90:
‘So,’ he said..’if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?’
‘Variant thirteen?’ Jeff have him the crooked grin again. ‘Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood’.
‘Oh, come on.’
‘Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.’
‘You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there either.’
‘So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and super-virility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which is the end is suicide, just slower and bit more fucking fun.’
‘I thought they criminalized that stuff.’
Jeff gave him a crooked grin. ‘Oh, yeah and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.’
‘I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk show genetics, Jeff.’
‘Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a singly social biologist who doesn’t count alpha male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood’ – the grin again – ‘so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas want to be soldiers, because, hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes’ – and Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody – ‘they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking, the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep and breath hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with the. See, a feminized open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.’
‘I didn’t ask for a class on the secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen’.
‘Yeah, getting there.’ Jeff took another chunk of his arrack. ‘See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down there where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked and shut down with a halfway decent black market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a big-hearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship programme at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us with knowing it. […] You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.’
‘Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson’.
‘They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.’
‘I know.’
‘Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?’
‘Variant thirteen?’
‘Yeah, variant thirteen. Pre-civilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.’
‘Now you you sound like the feeds.’
Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. ‘Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.’
‘I fail to see,’ said Norton acidly, ‘how that gives us back our manhood.’
‘That’s because you live in New York.’
Norton snorted and drained his arrack. His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done.
‘I’m serious, Tom. You think secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?’
‘Among other things, yeah, it was.’
Jeff shook his head. ‘That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside of quantum specialists really understands, Co-Operation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table is pointing towards a future so feminized it’s just downright unAmerican.
The current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur Rahman: ‘Actually it is even something of a misnomer to call such phenomena in Islam “fundamentalist” except insofar as they emphasize the basis of Islam as being the two original sources: the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’ Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘original thought’ and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalist ‘return to tradition’ is really a new invention.
The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalism might be understood, then, not a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony – and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony. [Shah’s Iran, Attaturk’s Turkey, Nasser’s Egypt] ‘If modern meant the pursuit of Western education, technology and industrialization in the first flush of the post-colonial period,’ Akbar Ahmed writes, ‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values and a rejection of modernism.’ Considered simply in cultural terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist theory – postmodern only because it chronologically follows and opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist, however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes ‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way, is novel because its basic élan is anti-Western … Hence its condemnation of classical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’ Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense ‘anti-Western’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution. (Hardt & Negri, Empire [2000] p. 148-149)
White Jesus amongst the White Aboriginals (from the Book of Mormon)
Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movement against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long US tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the ‘uncivilized’ world. The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous ere, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem. […]
The ‘traditional family’ that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street USA at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The ‘return to the traditional family’ of the Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order. (Hardt & Negri, Empire pages147-48)
‘How do you think we’ll look,’ Bigend asks, ‘to the future?’
[…]
‘They won’t think of us,’ Cayce says … ‘Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.’
‘I think they’ll hate us,’ says Helena.
‘Souls,’ repeats Bignend. […] ‘Souls?’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, on in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.’
‘Do we have a past then?’ Stonestreet asks.
‘History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,’ Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. ‘Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.’
‘The future is there,’ Cayce hers herself say, ‘looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.’
‘You sound oracular.’
‘I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.’ (pages 57-59)
[…]
‘Have you seen the guerrilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas? [Star Wars Ep I] […] They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films. Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s a though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else. (page 70)
From Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918):
The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.
From my Michael Jackson Project image (2003):
I want this painting to be in the AGO in 2116. I want kids on art school trips at the gallery to be bored while the underpaid instructor explains that a hundred years ago there lived this freak who commissioned a painting of himself surrounded by cherubs. She will say, ‘He had delusions of godlihood.’ Maybe she’ll even use big words with the kids, and say, ‘He aspired to an apotheosis in both physical and the musical forms’.Some might be interested, and they will go home and download Billy Jean and Thriller and watch the quaint 20th Century music videos and think, Thank God I didn’t live back then!
As interested as we are in mad Caligula, or the incestuous Lord Byron, most will go to their soy milk and cookies and not give a shit.
One of the things I love about William Gibson is his way with words. Such as below, in which he describes how Google is only really limited by one’s imagination of what to search for.
Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what’s out there and make it your own?
Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I’m lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I’m wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text. So people–and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition–would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.
Amazon.com: You’re annotated out there.
Gibson: Yeah it’s sort of like there’s this nebulous extended text. [For one deeply involved annotation, visit Joe Clark’s PR-otaku site–and see if you ever come back.] Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it’s all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I’m sure a lot of writers haven’t yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction.
Amazon.com: So are you able to google during your writing day, or do you have to block that off and say, all right–
Gibson: No, I’ve got Word open on top of Firefox.
Amazon.com: That’s very courageous.
Gibson: It’s kind of the only way I can do it. It’s replaced looking out the window, but I have to have–
Amazon.com: You need a certain stimulation to work off of.
Gibson: Yeah, I need a certain stimulation. It kind of feels like when you’re floating underwater and you’re breathing through a straw. The open Firefox is the straw: like, I can get out of this if I have to. I can stay under until I can’t stand it anymore, and then I go to BoingBoing or something.
Amazon.com: I think for some writers, they’d never get back in the pool with Google open to them.
Gibson: It’s not that interesting for me. I’m okay with it because it doesn’t pull me in that much. The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There’s some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you’ve never seen before. You’re still really inside some annotated version of your own head.
Mesmerizing contra-idoru anti-portraits. A reminder of the extent to which posthumanity is already here, but not evenly distributed. Sweat on the underDepp‘s ringer worth price of admission.
From Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: Preface pages x-xi:
One might have supposed, in the circumstances, that a principle preoccupation of intellectuals, who after all are supposed to see farther and think more deeply than ordinary men and women, would be the maintenance of the boundaries that separate civilization from barbarism, since those boundaries have so often proved so flimsy in the past hundred years. One would be wrong to suppose any such thing, however. Some have knowingly embraced barbarism; others have remained unaware that boundaries do not maintain themselves and are in need of maintenance and sometimes vigorous defense. To break a taboo or to transgress are terms of the highest praise in the vocabulary of modern critics, irrespective of what has been transgressed or what taboo broken. A review of a recent biography of the logical positivist philosopher A.J. Ayer, in the Times Literary Supplement, enumerated the philosopher’s personal virtues. Among them was the fact the he was unconventional – but the writer did not feel called upon to state in what respect Ayer was unconventional. For the reviewer, Ayer’s alleged disregard of convention was a virtue in itself.
Of course, it might well have been a virtue, or it might equally well have been a vice, depending on the ethical content and the social effect of the convention in question. But there is little doubt that an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to nonintellectual. What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient – the very people most in the need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement. The result is moral, spiritual, and emotional squalor, engendering fleeting pleasures and prolonged suffering.
This is not to say, of course, that all criticism of social conventions and traditions is destructive and unjustified; surely no society in the world can have existed in which there was not much justly to criticize. But critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilization needs conservation at least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable of doing much – indeed devastating – harm. No man is so brilliant that he can work out for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to them. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.
Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals had made bad situation incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notion about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect. John Maynard Keynes wrote, in a famous passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that practical men might not have much time for theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers. I agree: except that I would now add novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers. They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they have to say and how they say it.
From Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post 9/11 World interviews with David Barsamian, interview recorded 3 December 2004:
David Barsamian: As I travel around the country, and I’m sure you do as well, you here this refrain about, well, ‘what’s the tipping point, what is it going to take for people to go out into the streets and protest?’ and the comments that are made are like, ‘well, you know, Americans are too comfortable, they’ve got it too easy’ and then this interesting one, that material things will have to get much worse before there is protest.
Noam Chomsky: I don’t think that’s true. In fact serious protest is often come from … (sometimes it comes from people who really are oppressed) sometimes its come from sectors of privilege. I mean take the case I mentioned about the [anti-vietnam-war] resistance movement; I mean these were privileged kids. You know, they were college students, almost all of them, from the elite schools. That’s privilege, but within those sectors of privilege, a spark was lit, which was recognized both by the oppressors and the oppressed and in ways that were psychologically extremely difficult, sometimes traumatic, as I said, sometimes they even led to suicide, they were not a joke. And the kids were under terrific strain, but very privileged and they played a big role in changing the country, I mean they infuriated their rich and powerful, I mean, take a look at the newspapers then, there’s all sorts of hysterical screeching about bra burning and all these horrible things that are going on undermining the foundations of civilization, yeah, etc. What was really going on was the country was getting civilized. And of course, that infuriated the people of power and wealth. How can you dare get civilized? You’re supposed to get beaten by our club. And yes, you can find at the fringes of any popular movement things that are crazy, and you can condemn and so on and so forth, part of the job of intellectuals is to focus on those, to try and discredit the important things that are happening, which are undermining of privilege and power.
From Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It‘s essay, ‘A Taste for Danger’; consider his thoughts on dress near the end:
The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent; and a rejection of everything associated with one’s childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it. It was in Africa that I first discovered that the bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic. […] I was still of the callow – and fundamentally lazy – youthful opinion that nothing in the world could change until everything changed, in which case a social system would arise in which it would be no longer necessary for anyone to be good. The head nurse of the war in which I worked, a black woman, invited me to her home in the township for a meal. […] In this unpromising environment, I discovered, the nurse had created an extremely comfortable and even pretty home for herself and her aging mother. Her tiny patch of land was like a bower; the inside of her house was immaculately clean, tidy, and well – though cheaply – furnished. I would never laugh again at the taste of people of limited means to make a comfortable home for themselves.
Looking around me in the township, I began to see that the spotlessly clean white uniform in which she appeared every day in the hospital represented not an absurd fetish, nor the brutal imposition of alien cultural standards upon African life, but a noble triumph of the human spirit – as, indeed, did her tenderly cared-for home. By comparison with her struggle to maintain herself in decency, my former rejection of bourgeois proprieties and respectability seemed to me ever afterward to be shallow, trivial, and adolescent. Until then I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a rejection of the superficiality and materialism of the bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of torn, worn-out, and tattered clothes – at least in public – by those in a position to dress otherwise without a feeling of deep disgust. Far from being a sign of solidarity with the poor, it is a perverse mockery of them; it is spitting on the graves of of our ancestors, who struggled so hard, so long, and so bitterly that we might be warm, clean, well fed, and leisured enough to enjoy the better things in life.
From the same Chomsky interview quoted above (Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post 9/11 World interviews with David Barsamian, interview recorded 3 December 2004) with my bolding to highlight another way of considering poverty of dress:
Noam Chomsky: Take where we are [MIT]. You walk down the halls today and you remember what it was like when you walked down the halls forty years ago. It’s radically different. I mean, forty years ago it was white males, well dressed, respectful to the elders and so on and so forth. You walk down the halls today, it’s going to be like any other university: half women, third minorities, casually dressed, informal relations. Those are not insignificant changes, and they’ve gone all through society.
David Barsamian: Are the hierarchies breaking down?
Noam Chomsky: Of course. I mean, if women are not, don’t have to live like my grandmother, or my mother, hierarchies have broken down. Namely the hierarchies that kept them that way. I mean, for example now, in the town where I live (professional, middle class town, lawyers, doctors, so on) I learned recently (I didn’t know this) that there’s a special section of the police which does nothing but answer 911 calls of domestic abuse. That’s what they do, there’s several a week. I mean, if it’s several a week out there, you can imagine what it is in a poor community. Did anything like that exist thirty years ago? Twenty years ago? I mean, I wasn’t even conceivable then, ‘that’s none of anybody’s business if somebody wants to beat up his wife’. I mean, the wife didn’t even complain. They may not like, but that’s life. Is that a change in hierarchy? You bet. And furthermore, it’s one part of a very broad social change.
Brian Lehrer: You raised three kids, didn’t you reward and punish them to promote desired behaviors?
Noam Chomsky: Well, we … see if you believe in [B.F.] Skinner’s doctrines you wouldn’t punish them. So if you’re talking about Skinner no wouldn’t punish them, you would reward them. But no, I wouldn’t say that’s the right way to raise kids. And in fact to the extent that people do it, it has at most a marginal effect on the children, probably mostly harmful. But for their growth and development, it largely takes place on the basis of the outgrowth of their innate capacities. That’s true in every domain that we know. It’s true in language, it’s true in moral development, it’s true in anything that’s been studied carefully – visual development and so on. By now, these are almost truisms in the sciences.
-Noam Chomsky on the Charlie Rose Show, guest hosted by Brian Lehrer, 9 June 2006
Today’s Star reports that ‘Luminato a big success, say organizer’. What is the measure of this success?
‘Attendance was estimated to be more than a million people over the course of the ten days, says festival co-founder David Pecaut. “As you may know we set out an objective originally of half a million, so we more than doubled what we hoped to do in this very first year,” Pecaut said.’
So what if a million people showed up if they all thought it sucked?
Cultural events cannot be measured through numbers. This adds further proof, as Christopher Hume pointed out yesterday, that Luminato functioned as ‘A Businessman’s Notion of a Festival’.
Cultural success should be measured in memories and wonder, which is too ephemeral for a spreadsheet, and too long term for quarterly results.
The Toronto Star ran a story (Luminato: Success or big disappointment?) this morning offering readers the chance to compare and contrast two opposing views with regard to the inaugural Luminato festival. I missed almost all of the festival, which is to say, I didn’t find it very visible. I’m on Christopher Hume’s side that it represented ‘A businessperson’s notion of a festival‘ but I take issue with his write up: a corporate critic’s notion of a critique. There is far more that can be said about the failure of Luminato, a failure which may not be so explicit simply because the business people involved don’t have the imagination to understand the measure of the disappointment.
Hume writes in his third paragraph, defending some of the work:
‘And who couldn’t help but love Xavier Veilhan’s enormous black balls hanging in the atrium of BCE Place? Or Max Streicher’s floating horses at Union Station? Not to mention Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive light show that has been illuminating the night sky for days?’
I take issue with that first sentence ‘.. who couldn’t love …?’ which is precisely the type of stock-phrase Orwell warned writers against sixty years ago. I raise my hand … I am the Dr. Who of that phrase, he who felt nothing for the works mentioned. I didn’t see the light show, but what did I miss that can’t be seen at the end of August during the CNE or during some other corporate promotion when they beam lights into the sky? I walked by BCE last week and saw the ‘big black balls’ (is there supposed to be a pun in there?) and yawned … like I haven’t seen that kind of thing a million times before. Newsflash: every Christmas you can see a giant dead tree at the TD complex and crap hanging from the ceiling at the Eaton Centre.
Last week in conversation I argued that given current law, in which corporations are considered people, it follows that corporations should have their own inhuman art events. The result is something like Luminato, a ten-day bore-fest while the fleshy people get an insomniac’s night at the cold end of September.
L’Oreal Luminato vs. Scotiabank Nuit Blanche
The most obvious initial criticism can be aimed at the names, and the requisite corporate sponsorship which makes it seem like the bank and the make-up company had something profound to contribute to culture. For centuries, arts festivals have amounted to ‘bread and circuses’ put on by the wealthy to keep the poor from rioting but (as both these festivals have shown) that is no longer necessary in the age of internet porn, video games, and the corporate video art of movies and television.
Nuit Blanche is a French import, and in Paris, the name means ‘white night’. Luminato is a made-up word which sounds Italian or Spanish, and obviously allusive of ‘light’. In English, both of these names just come off as pretentious. Consider that for the French, having a festival named in the common language suggests the integration of art with life, whereas, in English, having it come with a pretentious name suggests the separation of art from life. Apparently culture in Toronto, is something one ‘does’ it is not something that is ‘lived’. Further, the naming problem can equally be found in the awkward acronyms that are attached to the two other cultural events – TIAF and TAAFI. Are we stupid or something? Why can’t we have a simple English name for an art fair, one that indicates the lived experience of culture?
Having said this, I acknowledge the first steps that both festivals represent in moving toward such an integration … both attempts are steps forward in bringing this city a cultural experience.
But let us now consider what we might mean by that: a cultural experience? Is not the goal of both festivals to bring the city something of what Europe has been doing for centuries – cultural events born of a time when the wealthy needed their obvious circuses as much as the poor needed their non-technological entertainments? One thinks of the great weddings and performances, the type of theatrical productions linked to the Medici, and those that Leonardo da Vinci orchestrated for the Duke of Milan; in the sixteenth century, the mystery plays which helped inspire a young Shakespeare to write theatre which is now considered the paragon of English expression. To this day, there are street battles with rotten tomatoes, the running of bulls, and town-square horse-races and matadors … Europe knows something of communal culture, which survives because of human scale, it’s simplicity, it’s emotion, and it’s deep relationship to the past.
And so in this year, there are three examples of super-famous arts festivals happening in Europe: The Venice Biennial, Documenta, and Sculpture Projects in Munster, along with the annual events mentioned above.
Luminato? Nuit Blance? Compared to these we have a long way to go before we measure up. The works highlighted by Hume (there were horses at Union Station?) are examples for the type of redecoration which passes for public art today. I’m partially borrowing from Stephen Colbert’s famous critique of Christo’s ‘The Gates’ in which he mocked the orange curtains as ‘redecorating a bike path’ but it seems to me that the big black balls, the inflated horses, the London-blitz light show only serve to highlight our fear of beautiful environments which enable truly cultured lives, and of art that is made by human beings for human beings in small scale facilities and not former warehouse spaces.
Our society is cruel and appreciates violence, anger, and killing – in short, the inhumane. It’s made stars out of so many people who’s behavior is nothing short of reprehensible. It allows people like Harper, Bush and Blair to govern it. And it aligns culture with corporate sponsorship and thinks that ‘if it’s big it’s good’. Luminato was an arts festival by Boomers for Boomers – and so it brought Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen, Eric Idle and Gore Vidal to town. Given what I said earlier about insincere language, it could have accurately been called the Hasbeenato.
In the featurettes that comes with the Lord of the Rings DVDs, the production designers makes passing comments about how beautiful the sets were, and one designer stated he would have loved to have Bilbo Bagins’ study for himself. My question is, why is this the case? Why is it that we’ve reserved beautiful environments for fantasy films? Why couldn’t buddy build himself that same study if he was able to build it for the film? How is it that beautiful environments – and the culture that goes with it – has come to be seen as a guilty pleasure not for everyday life?
When I first noticed the CGI cityscapes being done for the last Star Trek series, I couldn’t help compare that ‘starchicteture’ with the actual starchitecture going up in my city. Daniel Liebskind’s so called ‘radical’ architecture seem extremely conservative when we consider what we could be building instead, inspired by those alien city-scapes.
This is the disconnect between art and life which needs to be bridged – the separation of imagination into something reserved for fantasy, and the other reserved for quotidian functionality. Liebskind and Gehry provide the example of how that does not need to be the case: the technology is there to build whatever our imagination comes up with. Why do we keep settling for boring things, and limit these starchitects to imagining the unimaginative?
The idea that greatness is expensive (funds are still be raised to pay for the ROM and the AGO) is absurd given how much money is wasted everyday. The decadence of our culture isn’t only in our vast consumption of resources, the improvishment of the 90% of the world so that we can live in a society that is disproportionally and grotesquely rich: it’s rather the squandering that takes place (which makes it seem so unjustifiable to our governments that they should introduce limits and attempt to redistribute resources – it’s easier to continue to be inefficient).
Our inefficient use of our unfairly achieved wealth is triply insulting since we aren’t building the Pyramids – some great wonder of the world which could be considered a universal cultural treasure. No, instead we’re getting The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Luminato, Michael Lee Chin Crystals, Frank Gehry boats, and cold nights at the end of September for people who can afford to give up a night’s sleep. Considering the money that is potentially available, couldn’t we do something better, something we deserve?
Perhaps though, this all proves that we deserve nothing. These arts festivals amounting to easily forgettable trivialities, in which imagination is not free to express itself when our culture’s true imagination is dictated by television and movies (eagerly paid for and economically self-supporting). This all proves that culturally we already have way more than we need.
If we were asked to give something up in order that people elsewhere have more, chances are we’d barely notice. I barely noticed Luminato, and if the money used for it had been used for some kind of human betterment, we’d be better off. Waterfront light shows, inflatable balloons, hasbeen concerts are worth sacrificing to social justice.
Timothy Comeau’s new work “Outdoor Air Conditioning” (reproduced below) demonstrates, contra the recent humiliating announcement by PM-for-the- moment Steven Harper that Canada will not meet the Kyoto targets, that in the visual arts at least, we are doing our bit. Comeau’s work raises the bar for art within a conceptual framework, adding environmental impact awareness to create a neat tautological bundle. Not only is the work about the state of the environment (massively out of control and uncontrollable) but it is a model of environmental frugality: no materials, no crates, no shipping, no gallery, no printed matter, no mailings, no hard documentation, no archive. The work exists in the mind, and a mindful mind at that.
It leaves a child-size environmental footprint; Comeau’s computer, mine and yours (heavy metals and other hazardous materials not easily disposed of yet dutifully replaced every two years), energy consumed (see David Suzuki’s ad about the cost, in beer, of dedicated beer fridges), some miniscule part of the admittedly gargantuan infrastructure that supports the Internet. Proportionally, you have to think Comeau’s digitally-relayed concept adds hardly at all to all that, unless it is in the way it fuels the passion for ever more powerful and energy consuming digital communications.
Is it not time that every artwork include in its specifications, an environment impact assessment?
– R. Labossiere
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Today is June 5th and it’s cold outside. I declare the local weather pattern on this day to be a readymade installation entitled:
Outdoor Air Conditioning.
a free cooling centre open to the public during this global warming heat wave
It is a pity that the word ‘art’ carries with it, to a person not interested in the subject or not versed in its history, a suggestion of luxury and of superfluity, as contrasted with the utilitarian or the practical. Where this possibly derogatory tinge of meaning is not suggested, there is generally at least a feeling that the matters which the word calls up are those of interest to the specialist in design rather than to the world at large. People who are supposed to be interested in ‘art’ might, according to this view, possibly not be interested in literature and history. Contrary-wise, people interested in history of in literature might not be interested in ‘art’.
It is true that in recent centuries, those namely of recent modern history, the arts of painting and sculpture at least, have become mainly matters of luxury, and that as arts of popular education and instruction they have been displaced by printed books. Hence the difficulty of making immediately apparent, before the subject itself has been opened up, that a history of art is not so much a history of that arts of design as it is a history of civilization. But if this point is not apparent in advance, it is notwithstanding the point in which in recent years has drawn more and more attention to the subject until it is beginning to figure as an indispensable part of the philosophy and knowledge of general history.
– Introduction to Roman and Medieval Art by W.H. Goodyear, 1893
Manuel de Landa: Right now, everybody and their mothers call themselves ‘critical’. You go to New York City bookstores and there are huge sections of bookshelves called Critical Theory. Of course, those theories are the most uncritical in the whole world. They call themselves critical but in the end are so uncritical because they take for granted all kinds of assumptions, they don’t really criticize themselves, and so forth. What I meant when I said ‘criticism as an antidote to propaganda’ would be a new type of criticism that is much more theoretically grounded and goes beyond the fake kind of criticism, or dogmatic criticism, that we have become used to. If we criticize the Internet by simply calling it a ‘capitalist tool’ or a ‘bourgeois tool’. That was a standard way in which Marxists criticized things in the past, attaching ‘bourgeois’ to everything they wanted to criticize and, bingo, you had instant criticism like you had instant coffee. Obviously, that kind of criticism is not going to do anything, and indeed has become a kind of propaganda itself. I mean, you criticize to propagandize your own idea. The question in front of us now as intellectuals is whether we’ve inherited so much bullshit and therefore our criticism is bound, is condemned to be ineffective, or whether we can find ways out or escape routes out of this and create a new brand of criticism that recovers its teeth, its ability to bite, its ability to intervene in reality in a more effective way. Again, it would imply a collective effort of a lot of intellectuals who are fed up with what had been labeled as criticism in the past and is nothing but dogma and repetition, and come up with a new brand of criticism that is capable of fighting propaganda. (source; emph mine)
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I read in the headlines a story that’s gotten very little attention: in Alabama, federal authorities revealing they have broken up a militia plot to attack a group of Mexicans living in a small town north of Birmingham. Last week, six members of the Alabama Free Militia were arrested in a series of raids. The Birmingham News reported police uncovered truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher, 2,500 rounds of ammunition. The men appeared in court on Tuesday. But despite the violent plot, police did not accuse them of terrorism. Instead, police charged them with conspiracy to make a firearm, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a quarter of a million-dollar fine. The Anti-Defamation League says the weapons seizure was the largest in the South in years. Do you know about this group?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I’m really glad you brought that up. You know, I don’t know about this group in specific, but I think what we can extrapolate from this story is that the extreme right, militia groups, neo-Nazi groups, groups who should be considered domestic terrorists, see the anti-immigrant movement as their vehicle.
And, you know, there was an interesting, you know, story I noticed in 2000. The Michigan Militia effectively disbanded. This had the largest amount of members during the 1990s, during the heyday of the so-called anti-government militia movement. You know, they organized against Bill Clinton. Waco was their fantasy of black helicopters descending into their communities taking their guns away. And all the sudden they just disappeared. Where did they go?
The head of the Michigan Militia was interviewed, and he said, “Well, a lot of our guys like what’s going on now with the Republicans in power, and, you know, we’re looking to get into government, and we’re looking to support, you know, more mainstream causes, because they’re becoming more influential.” So you see an enormous cross-pollination between the membership rolls of the anti-government, domestic terrorist militias of the ’90s and groups like the Minutemen. So that’s what’s going on here.
And I think what we need to look out for, as the likelihood of a Democratic majority in government is very reasonable, you’re going to see a more extreme posture from these groups. Just imagine the scenario if Hillary Clinton in power, the perfect boogeyman for the anti-government right, a Democratic congress, you’re going to see them growing more and more extreme. And at the same time —
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve just passed the anniversary of the blowing up of the Oklahoma City building.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And at the same time, you’re going to see, you know, more vigilante action against immigrants. And, you know, it’s unfortunate that the government is not treating this as the threat that it is. They’re not treating it as domestic terrorism. Obviously, if these characters in Alabama were Arab Muslims, they would be on their way to some secret prison in Eastern Europe wearing diapers in a Learjet, ready to get waterboarded. But instead, you know, you’ve got a totally — they’re treated totally differently, and their ideas are advanced on shows like Lou Dobbs, which come on during dinner time. [emp mine]
Noam Chomsky, speaking on April 17th’s Democracy Now! when asked about ‘hope for the future’:
I have a slightly more hopeful sense than Howard [Zinn] at least expressed, I suspect he agrees. It’s true that the country, that in terms of institutional structure – government for the wealthy and so on – there hasn’t been much change in two hundred years but there’s been enormous progress. I mean even in the last 40 years, since the 60s. Many rights have been won – rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations (which is what the environmental movement is about), opposition to aggression is increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s after centuries of European imperialism – no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars; it’s now extended over the whole world, there’s an International Solidarity Movement – the Global Justice movement, which meet annually in the World Social Forum are a completely new phenomenon. It’s true globalization among people, maybe the seeds for the first true International. People from all over the world, all walks of life, many ideas which are right on people’s minds and agenda are in fact being implemented about a participatory society – the kind of work that Michael Albert’s been doing … these are all new things. There’s been lots of bits – nothing’s ever totally new – there are bits and pieces of it in the past but the changes are enormous. And the same with opposition to aggression. After all the Iraq War’s the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, it’s the first one I can think of which was massively protested before it was officially launched. It actually was underway we’ve since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway – but it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that the New York Times lamented that there’s a second superpower – the population. Well you know, that’s significant and I think gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression, we’re now in a period of regression but if you look at the cycle over time, it’s upwards and there’s no limits it can’t reach.
Having long pondered, without resolution, the meaning of what he had observed in his travels through the world, Twain told his old friend and clergyman Joe Twichell, in a letter of July 28, 1904, that at least “a part of each day—or night” the world vanished absolutely for him, leaving him no more than a thought drifting aimlessly in emptiness. At such moments it seemed to him that everything was “NON-EXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing . That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought . And I am that thought.” (MSM , 30).
William Morris, writing in 1894, and published July 16th of that year in Justice:
To sum up then, the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past which would have no serious relation to the life of the present. But the consciousness of revolution stirring amidst our hateful modern society prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crystalizing into a mere railer against ‘progress’ on the one hand, and on the other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root, and thus I became a practical Socialist. (p.382; Penguin’s News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ‘How I became a Socialist’)
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.
Good Reads Loves Diplomatic Immunities & A Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India
Critic and blogger Timothy Comeau writes on his Good Reads site of the ridiculously narrow coverage of the “war on terror”, complaining, rightly, that even the CBC can’t seem to get more than the military’s side of the story:
“…the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit.”
Check out and subscribe to Timothy’s Good Reads for lots of interesting reading, great links and compelling video on a whole range of subjects. Timothy’s the guy who got an arts grant to give a bunch of artists cable television so they could learn a little bit about what was happening in the world.
Henry Chadwick: Envoi: On Taking Leave of Antiquity in The Oxford History of the Roman World (1986)
Yet, even the barbarian invasions of the 5th Century AD fail to mark a decisive ending to the structures and values of classical Greece and Rome. If by ‘the end of the ancient world’ we mean the loss of a uniquely privileged position for Greek and Latin classics in western education and culture, then the shift cannot be described as decisive until the 20th Century, an age in which powerful forces inimical to the very notion of a ‘classic’ of the past providing a model or criterion of judgement over the present. Even as the 20th Century draws to a close, the continued centrality of Rome and of the old Mediterranean world retains at least one living and undiminished symbol in the Papacy, presiding over a community of more than 700 million people, most of whom do not live in Europe. Until very recent times the renewal of high culture in the West has been linked with some direct contact with the prime sources of this culture in antiquity: in Greek philosophy, in Roman law and administration, in the universalism stremming from biblical monotheism.
That is not to say that these three main sources are, or were at the time felt to be, wholly harmonious and co-operative friends. The Romans, from Cicero to Pope Gregory the Great, regarded the Greeks as too clever to be honest. The Greeks, as is clear from Plutarch, admired the Romans, but did not greatly appreciate being conquered by them and would have preferred their own incompetent government to Roman efficiency and justice. Christian monotheism represented a disruptive challenge to immemorial local cults and social customs throughout the Empire, and was met by vigorous resistance in the form of philosophic criticism and state harassment.
John Ralston Saul: The Doubter’s Companion (1994):
From the entry on Taste:
In late Imperial Rome, the great aristocratic pagan families were horrified by the rise to power of the lower-middle-class Christians whose churches were so plain and ugly that they were scarcely more than hovels. These rustic believers knew nothing about architectural principles and, we can surmise, had heavy accents and dressed without style. No doubt they were what those with taste would call common. Gradually, however, the aristocrats themselves followed the odor of shifting power and began to convert. Eventually the law left them no choice. It was probably a few generations before they actually thought of themselves as Christian, but in the meantime they brought taste to the church: architecture, decoration, mosaics, painting, liturgy, music. At last the bishops began to wear chasubles as magnificent as their positions. At last the bishops began to sound elegant and powerful. The beauty that resulted from the participation of the great old imperial families became an integral part of our pleasure in ourselves as civilized people. The new pagan Christian taste was quickly confused with the original Christian message of moral clarity. But those links were and remain purely imaginary.
Civilization
The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word `language`. This is not to suggest that images or music are of a lesser importance. It is simply that they have more to do with the unconscious. They are somehow part of metaphysics and religion. Civilization, if it means something concrete, is the conscious but unprogrammed mechanism by which humans communicate. And through communication they live with each other, think, create and act.
Western Civilization
This phenomenon is particularly aggressive about its superiority. Even among themselves Westerners are constantly asserting that they have the best religion, language, method of government or production. They can’t wait to tell people everywhere in the world how to dress, pray, raise their children and organize their cities.
Non-Westerners are at first charmed, then paralyzed by our insistent self-assurance. And when, a decade later, our reorganization of cities such as Bangkok has led to disaster or of most African economies to famine and urban poverty, they find themselves pressured to take Western advice on how to get out of their mess.
What makes us such know-it-all busybodies? Christianity? The deformation of Christianity? These are just four among the dozens of standard and contradictory explanations.
It may simply be that we have not got over being the Barbarians. Indeed our problem has never been the fall of the Roman Empire but, with a few Italian exceptions, that we are not the Romans, who felt the same way about not being the Greeks.
Western history harps on about the growing reliance of the degenerate Romans upon the virile Barbarians to man their armies. So virile that we eventually sacked Rome and took it over. This interpretation leaves the impression that Rome was filled with overweight people lying about in a drunken stupor or fornicating. We tend to skip over the high, and from a Christian point of view, positive civilization into which Rome had evolved. Even a glance at the 5th Century mosaics of Ravenna shows a level of artistic skill which we, the Barbarians, saw, admired, but were unable to absorb. And so it was lost for a 1000 years. We may have conquered Rome, but we remained bumpkins. As documents of the time indicate, we were treated as such by the elites of the Empire.
Charlemagne was not simply claiming historic legitimacy when he had himself crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day of the year 800. He was giving in to his own colonial emotions by claiming the status of those who had been superior to his people. As with the classic nouveau riche, he had succeeded in his own terms but felt obliged to wrap himself in the trappings of the things he could never be. Charlemagne was the great king of a large but backward tribe called the Franks. He wasn’t a Roman emperor. He was a Barbarian.
The long see-saw battle among the tribes of Europe over the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor continued this seemingly indigestible inferiority complex. In its wake, German and Russian kings declared themselves Caesar (Kaiser, Czar). In our own century [20th] the Roman overlord past has been repeatedly claimed by dictators and democrats.
In any case, for the last half-century this sort of squabbling has been over the illusion of appearances. After all, the reality of power had slipped away from the three European tribes and moved on to North America, yet another step removed from Rome. The inferiority complex followed in a cumulative manner.
No country has more imitated Roman architecture ad mannerisms than the United States. An early identification with the honest but militaristic ideal of Cincinnatus quickly declined into a taste for ‘triumphs’ and ‘bread and circuses’. George Washington would have been horrified, but he was dead when Congress had him sculpted, larger than life, as Zeus dispensing liberty. Why Zeus would dispense liberty isn’t clear, except to provide mythological legitimacy.
As the American dream gradually falters, so the sense of national superiority asserts itself with a growing reliance on Roman-style trappings of power. The most obvious element is a weakened emperor who today surrounds himself with more than 1000 personal advisers. This is what the Romans called a praetorian guard. It follows that as government officials leave for the airport from their Washington houses, which are fully equipped with alarms and window-bars to protect them against their fellow-citizens, it is to tell non-Americans, rich and poor around the world, that they ought to be doing things the American way.
Today is the type of day when I should be browsing in used bookstores: spring rain days, with classical music on the iPod, the stickiness of the humidity making my clothes cling as I look at the spines of books on row after row, while the shop owner plays classical music from CBC Radio2. In other words, today is the type of day when I’d rather be employed by a used book dealer than sitting in a florescent lit office.
On her blog, Milena Placentile directs her readers to the last issue of Goodreads, for my comments on Thrush Holmes Empire and the links to Michael Kuchma’s reviews.
Two thousand and fifty-one years ago they stabbed him until the blood pooled bright red – almost a neon orange – on the senate chamber floor. They were small of stature and small in number. Outside the spring sun shone done on a younger Rome, and we hear birds chirping, and in the voices of children yelling at each other in Latin.
And here the bravest man lies bleeding, the horror passing through the crowd of men who’ve killed their dictator, and this simple act was not captured on a video phone for us to watch. But people heard about it. In the ensuing power struggle between his nephew and his lieutenant, the story would become known. How he looked at Brutus and asked, ‘you too?’
I just found a review of last night’s Trampoline Hall, where I was the second speaker:
[…]
Growing old gracefully was ideal to the night’s second speaker as well. Timothy Comeau recalled his grandfathers fondness, in later life, for tea and crackers before bed and cited it as part of his personal vision of “the good life”. Comeau offered up personal conceptions of “the good life” as a replacement for religious, set in stone morality. He shied from any hierarchical ranking of morals or enforcement of a community standard. While his own ideal life, that of a vegan cyclist, seemed firmly at odds with the thrill seeking speed boaters he suggested as embodying a different sort of “good life”, Comeau preached only understanding and tolerance in the face of difference. When pressed, he did hint towards some vague Do No Harm principle. I couldn’t help feel that this approach would have to involve banning oil dependent thrill seeking and setting morality in stone anew, if a more environmental vision were to prevail. Yet I was made to feel that if I want to steal from the rich and give to the poor, begin a round of well planned political assassinations or force people to like good music that thats something wrong with me.
[…]
Regardless, it was great fun listening to each speaker and participating in the Q&A’s that followed. The night even wrapped up early enough for me to come home and have some tea and crackers before bed.
I was quoted in Nadja Sayej’s piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail. Nadja talked to me for a half-hour last weekend and it’s funny to see the conversation reduced to one sentence, and to see that it was edited to say that I attend this home shows, when I in fact do not. What I did tell Nadja was that I saw some things like home-shows when I was going to NSCAD – bands playing house-parties, and in particular sang the praises of my memories of the Yoko Ono cover band, the Loco Onos, featuring the cartoonist Marc Bell on vocals – which were nothing but yodeling screams that nonetheless fucking rocked.
From The Globe & Mail Saturday 10 March 2007:
[…] Coffee and Couches takes place every two months in his butter-coloured apartment. Featuring all-acoustic local performances from groups such as the Blankket, Mantler and Jon-Rae and the River, it’s an alternative to the deafening atmosphere of rock clubs. “It’s just to get out of the bar,” says Mr. Parnell, who started his event as a series of loud house parties in his previous home in the Annex. But after he moved into this second-floor storefront, they evolved into quieter sets. With advertising through message boards and e-mail, a turnout of 30 to 50 for each event is typical, as are full pots of coffee as an alternative to bottles of beer.
“It’s a private, privileged experience,” says Timothy Comeau, a 32-year-old artist who attends home shows. “They feel special. It’s a way for the indie scene to separate themselves from the lame-asses.”
Though home shows are unconventional in nature, they never used to be. Gregory Oh, a 33-year-old music professor at the University of Toronto, notes that the idea of a musical performance at home goes back to 17th-century Europe. “Harpsichords and clavichords are small instruments; they weren’t loud enough to fill a hall,” Prof. Oh says, adding that classical musicians or their patrons would invite crowds to salon recitals. “Because they belonged in small spaces, shows were held at home. Some things haven’t changed.”
This Goodreads is in part of confession of ignorance, and how wonderful things can be when you don’t have the full picture. Which is to say, they’re fantastic when not dulled by the acquired cynicism of ‘an inside story’. And perhaps it is by coming to the experience initially ignorant, having that wonderful first impression, that the further nuance associated with it doesn’t diminish its glow.
Two of the items discussed here refer to art exhibitions on in Toronto presently, which is to encourage any of you for whom it is possible to visit them.
These four fantastics are presented in the order in which I experienced them.
I. Fantastic One | Darren O’Donnell at CCL1
Darren O’Donnell’s work over the past couple of years has been fantastic. His Suicide Site Guide to the City wowed me when I saw it in 2005, and apparently this was because of the ignorance mentioned above, as Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote in his review at the time ‘…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation’. I admitted in my review that I was one of such an audience. Yet, how could we not appreciate Haircuts by Children or Ballroom Dancing for Nuit Blanche?
In an arts scene riven by competition and jealousies, Darren’s work is something that we all seem to appreciate without such pettiness. I recently attended the latest production from his theatre company, Diplomatic Immunities: THE END and was genuinely touched: Ulysses Castellanos singing Queen’s `We are the Champions` at the end of the show almost made me cry. This was the song voted on by children at a local school to be that which they wanted to hear at the End of the World. (My vote at the present time is either The Beatles’ `Tomorrow Never Knows` or `Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)` and as I listen to them nowadays I imagine it playing over the footage of this video.)
But what is it about Darren’s work along these lines that is so generally fantastic? For me it highlights what is perhaps a greater shift in our culture, which is a movement toward an interest in ‘real life’ (and to that end, reality-tv represents this transition, by using non-actors but still tying them to some sort of narrative structure). The work of Darren’s theatre troupe, Mammalian Diving Reflex, forgoes an explicit narrative structure and seemingly let’s that emerge on it’s own.
Here, I’m most inspired by a snippet of dialogue from a Star Trek show. In the Enterprise episode ‘Dear Doctor’ which first aired in January 2002, there’s a scene depicting movie-night on the starship; while watching ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ a 1943 film being shown in that time-frame of 209 years from its creation, the character Ensign Cutler asks the alien Doctor Phlox, ‘They don’t have movies where you come from do they?’ He replied, ‘We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discovered their real lives were more interesting’.
Now, imagine living on Phlox’s planet during that time of transition, when people were discovering their own lives were more interesting. Wouldn’t that time resemble our own, with diminishing box office returns, reality-tv programing undermining celebrity culture, a global communications network allowing for unedited dialogue within varying degrees of privacy, and the rise of the documentary genre in popularity?
This statement was typed out initially by a scriptwriter in Los Angeles at the beginning of this decade and perhaps was meant both as an inside joke to Star Trek’s fanbase (Shatner’s ‘Get a Life‘ skit from his 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live) and reflecting the concern of Hollywood that they would lose their market. Three years later, Enterprise was cancelled, the only franchise since its resurrection twenty years ago to not last through seven seasons.
Leaving DI: The End four weeks ago I was convinced that our own lives were definitely more interesting. The performance incorporated an element of chance in its selection of two audience members during the course of the evening for interviews by the cast and attendees; on the night I was there, I was stunned by the answers given by the second girl chosen, who told us of saving the life of one of her friends during a climbing accident years before. Also, when asked a question along the lines of ‘why are we here’ she gave such an unexpectedly Buddhist/Eastern Tradition answer that I found myself saying ‘wow’.
The point made for me was that this girl, who had simply been someone sitting in the aisle in front of me, had a much more dramatic world inside her than anything I’m ever offered by fictional constructions, and I took this knowledge onto the street, walking with my companion who was someone new in my life and hence still full of mystery, and saw everyone around me with a new appreciation for our variety, our potential, and of the unknown masterpieces of real life.
This past Thursday, I attended Darren’s opening at The Centre of Leisure and Culture No. 1, Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India which consists of an approximately twenty-minute video and chapbooks of the blog Darren kept while on tour in Pakistan and India late last year. I’ve prompted Darren to place this video online eventually, and if and when that happens I’ll follow through with the link.
At the time of Darren’s trip, I was moved to contact CBC’s The Current because I’d recently heard an interview (begins at 7:45min) with the 24 year old Afghani woman Mehria Azizi who was doing a tour through Canada showing a documentary she’d made about women’s lives in her homeland. This had been one of the more insightful things I’d been exposed to with regard to this part of the world. I imagined Anna Maria Tremonti asking Darren about his conversation with Mike the soldier on the plane, or asking for stories from Darren’s experience with the humanity of these people. I figured it would have fit into The Current’s mandate as I understood it: to educate, to inform, to bring us perspective. Darren’s work deserved this national audience. There was a bit of a followup from someone who was going to forward the info to a producer but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, due to the unreliableness of the CBC’s internet stream, and what I see as too much focus on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, I’ve avoided listening to The Current at work for the past couple of months, preferring instead France Culture or the BBC. I did catch the broadcast the other day of their self-flagellation on under and mis-reporting the story of Global Warming. Anna Maria was somewhat bothered by a statement of one of the scientists: ‘never underestimate the illiteracy of reporters’.
The following morning, (that of March 9th) the CBC included in its news roundup the visit by Canada’s Governor General to the troops in Afghanistan, and there was something said about ‘putting a human face’ on the story (mov and realmedia). What’s unfortunate is that Michaëlle Jean, who in the past has seemed an intelligent, well informed woman, was responsible for the stupidest statements in the report. ‘There’s no future without women …’. No shit. But perhaps the real fault lies with the editors of the video, or the fact that she used to be a reporter.
The evening before I’d been to Darren’s show to see the Pakistan video, the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit. My understanding of the situation and of the people involved has been greatly enhanced by Darren’s first-person and personal reporting and the fact that the CBC found him fit only for their hipster-oriented Definitely Not the Opera kind of suggests how little they take his work seriously … something silly for the kids right?
II. Fantastic Two | Monks in the lab
I watched/listened to this video on Friday at work, and it was fantastic. I especially liked the idea that the effect of mediation was to practice (and thus grow new neurons) paying attention to autonomic processes, which allows us to have greater awareness of our emotions and perceptions, so that we do not need to find ourselves ‘out of control’ or ’swept away’ by strong impulses. In my dream of the future, I want children to be taught meditation in kindergarten, as an essential life skill, just as much as doing your physical exercises and learning your maths.
As I’ve noted about Darren’s work, that it seems to miraculously inspire more admiration than jealousy, the work of Zin Taylor could be accused of inspiring more jealousy than admiration. Consider the facts as they appear: part of the Guelph university educated elite clique, he gets to be in show after show in prestigious galleries with work that is sometimes weak (the piece at The Power Plant in 2005 for example) and Taylor’s continual presence in the Toronto art scene PR seems to be attempting to break the record established by Derek Sullivan. Both artists appear to have been elevated to that collection of what seems like the less than ten artists who are overexposed in Toronto and who are continually asked to ‘represent’ this city of millions to others and to itself.
And so it was with ambivalence that I went down to the YYZ opening on Friday night; a chance to drink beer, be social, see some people I like to talk to and consider friends, and be ignored by those who used to say hi to me but now just think I’m an asshole or something. I wasn’t at all expecting Taylor’s video to win me over as it did, and it is now on my highly recommended list.
And yet, my appreciation for this work was based on my ignorance of its subject matter. I recall seeing years ago the call for submissions from the Yukon asking for artists to come on up and be inspired. I also recall hearing that Allyson and Zin, two artists I’d recently met through a friend, had been chosen to go. And so I knew over the past few years that Allyson and Zin had a connection to the Yukon and that they were making work about it.
With Put your eye in your mouth (which a friend suggested meant ‘digest what you see’) Zin has made a sort of fake documentary on a fake thing: Martin Kippenberger’s metro-net station in Dawson City. Now, my ignorance here was based on being familiar with Kippenberger’s name but not his work, so when watching the video, I thought Zin had seen this structure and made up an elaborate history for it, tying it to some art-star’s name in order to get in the trendy props to the masters. Turns out the Metro-Net was legit (also here), and yet this only diminishes by a bit the overall video, which is still fantastic. It is this type of elaborated imagination that I want to experience with art, and in as much that conceptual art usually goes for obscure one-liner cleverness, I hate it for its denial of the imagination. Now, considering Taylor’s background from Canada’s new conceptual It-School, I suppose I can say he’s showing that you can be both conceptual and imaginative, and the product is better for it.
IV. Fantastic Four | Kuchma’s Thrush Holmes reviews
The suspicions I had of Zin Taylor’s elaborate imagining of what could have been ‘the mine-shaft entrance’ follows on January’s suspicions that the opening of Thrush Holmes Empire was part of an elaborate joke.
There’s been talk in the scene of it being some kind of hoax, and personally I thought this was the case. I was trying to keep my mouth shut about it all, not wanting to ruin it, but now that I’ve been assured that this is not a masterpiece-parody on the art world constructed by Jade Rude and Andrew Harwood (the co-directors of the Empire space) (’they’re not that clever’ I was told), I guess I share my disappointment that this really is the work of a presumptuous and pretentious young man who makes terrible work. As I said at the opening in January, ‘if this work is a parody, it’s a masterpiece, but if it’s legit I feel sorry for the guy’. In other words, in my ignorance, I imagined a fantastic scenario in which Jade and Andrew had collaborated on making quick, easy, and lazy work to fill up wall space in time for the opening, and hired an actor to play Thrush Holmes (which plays too close to the great 90’s indie-rock band Thrush Hermit). No mother names their son Thrush, so whoever this guy is, his wallet certainly doesn’t contain ID linking him closely with Joel Plaskett’s 90s project.
(A Thrush Hermit Aside
Seeing Ian McGettigan cover The Wire’s ‘I am the Fly’ in 1999 was part of the reason I gave up watching live music once I moved to Toronto – nothing would ever top that, and I prefer to have my indie-music memories packaged around my experience in Halifax rather than have continued on with the ringing ears of today’s stuff. Even though that meant I missed out on seeing the shit like this live).
The only person who seems to be addressing this Thrush Holmes issue is Michael Kuchma.
As I mentioned in the last Goodreads, I was part of a panel discussion at Toronto’s Gallery 1313 on art criticism. I had a good time and it was well attended despite being both a Monday and the weather being less than conducive to a social gathering. (The event was recorded and will potentially be made available as a podcast, and if/when that happens I’ll send out a link). During the Q&A, I was asked a question from a fellow in the audience who later identified himself via a comment on the BlogTo blurb writen by fellow panelist Carrie Young the day after.
Michael Kuchma is trying to write some thoughtful criticism about the Toronto scene and I glad that I was able to learn about it through these circumstances. I appreciate his take not only on the Thrush Holmes stuff but also on the Toronto scene in general, and I also appreciate seeing the influence of the panel talk in his writing: I guess it was worth something in in the end.
In the second link (’why we Should…’) make note of point number 3:
Perhaps some fear that Holmes is orchestrating a brilliant art-stunt, and that passing judgment right now puts one in the vulnerable position of looking stoooopid and hasty on the day when Holmes comes clean with his Machiavellian master plan.
This is pretty much why I’ve kept quiet for this long, not wanting to ruin for everybody, and wanting to see Garry Michael Dault embarrassed for ‘falling for it’ as he had a positive review in the Globe & Mail on the day after the opening. (Why would I like to see Dault with egg on his face? Because Dault’s work as a critic is worthless – his reviews are almost always positive, unless he dares insinuate that someone has skills, at which point they are dismissed as being ‘illustrative’). A hoax or not, Kuchma’s thoughts on the whole matter are the most substantial I’ve come across and I’m glad he’s putting them out there.
Last night I was at Gallery 1313 as one of six guest panellists in The Role of the Art Critic, the first roundtable discussion (well, rectangular-table discussion) as part of Gallery 1313’s ArtSPEAK series, along with Toronto art writers and critics David Balzer, Peter Goddard, Claudia McKoy, the Editor-In-Chief of MIX, Stephanie Rogerson, Timothy Comeau, and last but not least, our moderator Nick Brown.Gallery 1313’s Director, Phil Anderson, did a fabulous job in organizing the event, which packed in a full-house despite the inclement weather of yesterday’s “perpetual snow”, and everyone involved was simply mahvelous to meet (though some were simply more mahvelous than others — saucy Timothy Comeau for instance or Stephanie Rogerson, with whom I share a fondness for Claude Cahun — but I may be biased as they were both on my end of the table).
Over the past three weeks I’ve been reading Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, which I learned of by way of Darren O’Donnell’s ‘darren-in-pakistan‘ blog (speciffically this posting) and I was actually inclined to read it. With regards to Empire I’ve had the same attitude that Noam Chomsky expressed about it here:
QUESTION: It seems to me, with a certain degree of difference, that the concept of a virtual senate is similar to Negri’s and Hardt’s concept of Empire. [Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)]
CHOMSKY: Empire, yes, but I have to say I found it hard to read. I understood only parts, and what I understood seemed to me pretty well known and expressible much more simply. However, maybe I missed something important.
QUESTION: Yes, and the book arrives to the same conclusion as yours but through a more complicated, less readable way…
CHOMSKY: If people get something out of it, it’s okay. What I understand seems to be pretty simple, and this is not a criticism. I don’t see any need to say in a complicated way what you can say in an easier way. You can make things look complicated, that’s part of the game that intellectuals play; things must look complicated. You might not be conscious about that, but it’s a way of gaining prestige, power and influence.
I’ve thus carried a prejudice toward Hardt & Negri’s work over the past few years, but something in the way Darren introduced it intrigued me; further web-reaserch led me to believe it was the type of thing I should read since it elaborated on what I’ve been personally calling the politics of variety.
I can’t say I totally agree with all of it – but I was open to its analysis. Getting through the first section was difficult – I don’t feel like I’m living in a Global State of War as much as I feel I’m living in a culture of propaganda continually devoted to telling me some asshole blew up some other assholes somewhere I have no plans of visiting.
My own understanding of American Empire is largely metaphorical – I agree with the premise of Empire but my feeling is that they administrations of the Western world’s nation-states don’t know what they’re doing in that regard – they are too incompetent. In other words, while academics can diagnose and Imperial condition, the reality is that the Western governments are in denial.
The ending, focusing on the democratic project of multitude, seems to elevate multitude to the sovereignty they wish to deconstruct. It also seeks to abolish all authoritarian structures with the aim of having an anarchist state ruled by the common interest and affective (‘niceness work’ one could call it) labour of the multitude – the network of individual interests.
What seems lacking is a recognition of the capitalist market as it exists as a form of multitude already self-organizing – but I know that’s such a faux pas to even mention it. As well, there seems to be a lack of acknowledgment of the substantial work that would need to be undertaken to ‘phase in’ the current mainstream mass of corporate workers and other people who don’t read, don’t think, and have no real capacity to function as they are within such a democratic society. In other words, how does one prevent the democratic multitude from being merely an autocracy of cliques? Such cliques would be identified as knowing who Hardt & Negri even are, as opposed to the mainstream, which is more preoccupied this weekend with Brittany Spears’ new haircut.
I. But first, let’s imagine how we might be thought of in the future.
The Modern, Nodern, Oddern, Podern, and Qodern Periods
The predominance of using the prefix ‘post’ to name a period (almost always the one in which people found themselves at the time) flourished in the first decade of the 21st Century, and as one writer noted, ‘everything is posts … I need a saw to cut them down, too see the horizon’. Recognizing the Modern period as being the one which encompassed most of the 20th Century, one that was clearly defined, it followed that one should simply used the letters of the alphabet to replace the ‘post’ fashion, and hence, post-modernism was renamed the Nodern, and post-post-modernism was renamed the Oddern (although it is notable that post-post-modernism was never as popular, and many people were confused by this point not knowing exactly what time they were living in).
The first decade of the 21st Century, according to the historical records, referred to its self variously as:
‘post-nine-eleven’
‘post-national’
‘post-modern’ (or shortened to ‘pomo’)
‘post-post-modern’
‘post-industrial’
‘post-agrarian’
The Nodern Period
The Nodern was once known as the ‘post-modern’ and characterized the time between, roughly, 1975-1995. Since it saw itself as a movement that put Modernism behind it, it is perhaps explained best by looking at how it saw Modernism. As the overall paradigm of the 20th Century, Modernism defined how human beings in the West saw both themselves and their creative works. It created neat categories to enable definition, but in the language of the late 20th Century’s marketing, ‘post-modernism’ was about ‘thinking outside the box’.
It’s language emphasized the prefix ‘meta’ meaning ‘overarching’ and so, Post-Modernist/Nodernist talk refers to ‘metanarratives’. The most famous definition of what it meant to be beyond Modernism was to see ‘metanaratives’ as unbelievable.
The privileging of one story as had been the case under Modernism came into question, and the Nodern began to look into the as yet untold stories. Although, it is also necessary to point out the Western centric dominance of this vision, as the so-called untold stories were simply untold by Western thinkers to a Western audience. The Nodernist thinkers, while claiming to be on the side of the ‘non-west’ really saw themselves as deeply involved in the Western tradition that goes back to Latin Classicism.
The Nodern period was also characterized by a dominant political ideology that attempted to recast human life in simple economic terms. The politics of the time were characterized by an overall concern with ‘lowering trade barriers’ with the belief that such action would improve human life across the globe, and while misguided in the extreme, represents the first stirrings of a globalized mono-culture, one that began to develop with the increased capacity of telecommunication technology and the ease of global travel in the late 20th Century. The unbelief in One-Story (metanarrative) was fostered by the evidence that there were an extraordinary variety of stories that people could pick and choose from in order to lead richer lives.
Noism
Cultural historians often joke that the Nodern refers to ‘nothing good came out of it’. The clash between the tradition dating back to Ancient Rome in the West, and the confrontation with an global political and cultural tradition, reminiscent of empires (especially those of 19th Century Europe) caused much confusion and is one of the reasons the joke came about. It is best seen as a highly concentrated period of upheaval and transition, and it is sometimes popularly called Nomo.
This has prompted some contemporary culturalists to claim they are Noists, with the Toronto group The No-no Things being perhaps the best well known. In this way, they claim to be the fulfillment of the 20th Century avant-garde project (which the Nodern claimed to be the height of at the time) as the 20th Century Dadaists were named after the Russian term for ‘yes’ – ‘da’. Hence, answering the Dadaists nonsensical Yes Yes with their highly contrived and intellectual No No. It is notable to point out that Noism is highly esoteric and therefore culturally irrelevant within our larger Qodern context.
The Oddern and Podern Period
The six year period between 1995 and 2001 is referred to by historians who use this terminology as the Oddern period, who smirk when they say it was characteristically ‘odd’. The beginning of the end of the globalist ideology manifested itself in a rise of popular protests – first in 1997 against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and most famously, ‘The Battle in Seattle’ in 1999, which was followed by popular protests throughout 2000, culminating in April 2001 in Quebec City. Protests were planned for events that autumn, but the terrorists attacks of 11 September suddenly altered the political dialogue and ended the care-free callousness that had been popular in the developed world since the end of the Cold War ten years before.
The Oddern was also seen to be odd due to the rather sudden blossoming of the internet, which transformed everyone’s lives – henceforth, email and websurfing and stories of ‘dot-com millionaires’ became ordinary, while the politics of the United States focused on the sex-life of the President culminating in an attempted impeachment.
The Podern was so called because P followed O which followed N which followed M; so wrote the historian who coined the term. But a rival school of thought argues that the Podern is specific to the autumn of 2001 when Apple Incoperated introduced the iPod, which became the defining artifact of the time. As the iPod allowed for the assembly and playback of a vast amount of files (which hadn’t been possible before, and the iPod’s storage capacity at the time was unique) it is seen to be an appropriate term for this period since its culture consisted to a large extant of reassembly and recontextualization.
People living during the Podern Period sometimes called this ‘the deejay culture’. The term deejay comes from the acronym, D.J, (disc jockey) those who remixed and assembled playlists of music at nightclubs or on radios. The term jockey goes back to horse racers, hence the sense that this was the one in control. The first radio broadcasters would play a variety of music singles (which at that time consisted of vinyl discs) and with the development of the music-movie (known as ‘music videos’) the term was modified for those who introduced them on television. They were called veejays (‘video jockeys’).
The deejay began to overtake the rockstar in the early 1990s as the appreciable peak of music performance, with the rave dance parties that began in the UK in the 1980s. By the early 90s, the rave had been imported to North America, and by 1995 it was known in the mainstream. Hence, the late 90s, while known as the Oddern, are also referred to by cultural historians at The Early Podern Period. The school which promotes the presence of the Apple iPod device as the defining characteristic of the Podern (rather than merely going with the alphabetical arangement) agrees with this assessment, noting that the iPod’s arrival in 2001 was also the first proper year of the 21st Century, and the year in which the terrorists attacks on the United States occurred, the defining political event of that era.
It was also during this time that ‘classicism’ was re-defined to encompass more that it had previously. During the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, Western centric cultural observers always referred to ‘classical’ as being the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome – defined simply perhaps as ‘the architectural column’. Neo-classicism developed in the late 18th and 19th Century, and at that time referenced the fashion of imitating the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, but neo-classicism was followed by Modernism. By the early 21st Century, Modernism had developed it’s own cannon of ‘classics’ which were then copied, referenced, and imitated in such as way that the sampling and re-assembly of this cannon by the Podernists represented a Modernist neo-classicism. Historians now speak of ‘Latin Classicism’ when referring to the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, and even that of the European Renaissance to the 19th Century Neo-classical period, since what these cultures all have in common (except for the original Greek) is the presence of the Latin language in the culture (either as the vernacular in the earliest, or as the language of European scholarship later on).
The Old Master Painters, who had become unfashionable during Modernism, began to be imitated by a generation of painters in the late 20th Century, and who were then called ‘New Old Masters’ and eventually, New Masters, until that died out and the term ‘Master Painter’ returned to the vocabulary as someone who excels in the craft of image making by hand.
Self-reflection in the Podern Period
The Podern is marked by the terrorist attacks on the United States of America on 11 September 2001, which sparked a flourishing of American militarism, and subsequent wars against Afghanistan during 2001-2002, Iraq in 2003, and Iran in 2007. The international dialogue shifted from one of ‘globalized trade’ (popular during the Nodern) to one of renewed nationalities and cultural identities.
Many at the time were dismayed to see the dialogue revert from that of the late 20th Century’s secular humanism to one that seemed to pit the United States’ version of fundamentalist Christianity against the Middle East’s version of fundamentalist Islam. Centering the dialogue on cultural identity seem to be nothing more than the mainstream catching up to much of the cultural elites preoccupation with what was called ‘identity politics’ during the Nodern’s 1990s, and encouraged self-reflection at all levels during the decade of 2000s.
In television, Dr. Phil was a popular therapy show, (although never had Foucault’s warnings about conformity and madness had a greater example); the show had been an offshoot of the ever-popular eponymous Oprah Winfrey show, which emphasized self-improvement through the ‘tales of personal triumph’ of common people and celebrities, with handy shopping tips thrown in for good measure and promotion. In movies (the dominant art form of the time) self-reflection is emphasized in the films written by Charlie Kaufman: Being John Malkovich (1999) is about seeing the world through some-one else’s eyes (John Malkovich was a popular actor who himself stared in the film). In Adaptation (2002), Kaufman caricatured himself by making a confused scriptwriter part of the story, inventing an identical twin brother to balance his neurotics. In Chad Schmidt (2008), the eponymous character is an actor who has a hard time finding work because he too closely resembles Brad Pitt, the most famous actor of the decade, played by Brad Pitt himself.
In theatre, Darren O’Donnell exemplified this intensive self-reflection with his play A Suicide-Site Guide to the City (2003-2006).
The Qodern Period
Some historians, uncomfortable with the easy explanation of using the alphabet to name the eras, look to the 20th Century’s use of Q to explain the Qodern. The letter Q became very popular in the second-half of the 20th Century, being used as pen-names and as the title of books; in the James Bond film series, Q was the alias of the UK’s Secret Service engineer; in the Star Trek Sagas Q was a mischievous god. The Dutch author Harry Mulisch named the main character in his 1997 novel, The Discovery of Heaven Quinten Quist, whose initials of QQ hinted at his supernatural characteristics. As Mulisch wrote:
‘His initials are Q.Q.’ ‘Qualitate qua,’ nodded Onno. ‘That is rare. The Q is the most mysterious of letters, that circle with that line,’ he said, while he formed a slightly obscene gesture a circle with the manicured thumb and index finger of one hand and the line with the index finger of the other, ‘the ovum being penetrated by a sperm. And twice at that. Very nice. My compliments.’ (p.361)
The contemporary historian Wu Zhenguo identifies the Qodern with that of the Star Trek Sagas‘ character. Noting that Q was seemingly omnipotent, omnitemporal, and omnipowerful he argues that our present society’s capacity for ‘all-awareness’ via the net is an adequate metaphor for our capacities. We may not be able to have things materialize out of thin air with a snap of the fingers, as could Q, but the idea Wu advances is that our capacities through nanotechnology and intercommunication most resembles that of our historical ideas of what only gods were capable of.
In addition, through our Representative technology, we can indeed speak with historical characters, in ways that Q flaunted and that which we were not capable of doing during the Podern.
The Qodern is a time period of psychological health, intensive communication and dialogue. The banes of existence throughout history: poverty and disease, have been eliminated for the most part: all diseases are at least treatable but no longer death sentences, and the lifespan has been extended so that one can afford a greater amount of time reading, thinking, or playing, barring the unfortunate accident of course.
The development of the Podern period began to show people how unprofitable it was to continue to dehumanize any segment of society, and how much better off everyone could be by extending benefits and encapsulating dialogue in a system of rights. While the globalist economic arguments which petered out by the Podern created for a time a sense of confusion, ultimately we look back and see how this time allowed for our new view of society as an engine for creativity and education to emerge. The view that all of us enjoy and benefit from today.
I’ve been so impressed with what WordPress allows me to do with this blog, I applied it to Goodreads, and over the past week worked toward launching a new interface, which I did tonight. I still need to go through and complete the categorization, but that won’t take too much longer. I plan on beginning the podcast feature in March, which won’t be anything too special: simply another and simple way to access the audio content. There are some aspects to the current design I’m unsure of, and they could be modified in the days or weeks ahead.
Last Sunday saw this year’s Superbowl, when the marketing agencies try to wow us into another enthusiastic year of American consumerism. I was in no mood for any of it; in fact, I was rather grumpy last weekend. So when I found Theodore Dalrymple’s intolerant text entitled Freedom and its Discontents in which he expresses thanks for not having to voice on radio his thoughts on the 12 year old Austrian boy who recently had a sex change, I was annoyed and grumpified even more, although I appreciated his perspective. He wrote:
If I had spoken my mind, without let or hindrance, I should have said what I suspect a very large majority of people think: that there is something grotesque, and even repugnant, about the whole idea of sex-changes, let alone of sex-changes for twelve year-olds.
I don’t find the issue repugnant nor do I find it very interesting. Dalrymple goes on to write about how the freedom of expression has been curtailed, not by onerous censorship laws, but by the intolerance of the politically correct. He concludes by writing: ‘Please don’t reply to any part of this article. I won’t read it: I know I’m right.’Those who know they are right are the most exasperating people one ever has to deal with. Stubborn minded fools so set in their ways they don’t even care about appearing to be ignorant, deluded and hateful. Dalrymple’s work nevertheless tends to be a good read because we can learn and gain something from his perspective. He isn’t constrained by an idealism, nor his he constrained by the specialized knowledge that cuts ‘those in the know’ off from the common.
Over my time doing this list, I’ve occasionally received letters taking to task something I wrote in introduction, or questioning my link selection. I thought I would need a defense of Dalyrmple’s article saying basically: don’t shoot the messenger, and began it anticipating this edition. But over the past week, I saw more than one article appear which basically underlines a theme of intolerance. It is one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing with Goodreads, and that is attempting to document through the link selection the occasional popular meme – an idea which seems to be expressed in more than one article appearing simultaneously from different sites.
The greatest example of intolerance in current public/web discussion has to do with the Holocaust, and seems focused on the latent assumption that the next war will be with Iran. There seems to be a lack of appetite in the United States for another invasion, which is a good thing, but churning along underneath the popular sentiment is the attempt by the right-wing blowhards to demonize Iran’s president Ahmadinejad who made the cover of yesterday’s (Feb 10) Globe & Mail. We have been told for months that Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier, because he has said in the past that it was a myth. Out of an extreme generosity and skepticism of North American propaganda, I’ve questioned whether he didn’t mean the anthropological sense of the word, until I remembered referring in recent conversations to consumerism as a myth (meaning it as an inaccurate oversimplification of our economic activity) and I was using the popular form of the word.
To clarify: anthropologically a myth is a story of meaning, one that punches above its weight of accumulated incidents. To say that the Holocaust is a myth under this context I think is accurate. It is has found a high, and defining, place in the Jewish story, and in a world of secularism, it seems that while not all contemporary Jews may believe in their God, they certainly all believe in their near genocide. As a gentile I find the overwhelming presence of the story sometimes noxious, as it has seemed to breed an unhealthy and unproductive paranoia that generates more hatred and anger than peace. And as a gentile I have to be very careful about what I say regarding this historical incident, since there is an element within Judaism who are ready to condemn any one who questions this reality in any way, who seem to think that all gentiles are closeted anti-Semites ready to light up the ovens again if given the chance. The taboo and reverence that is now tied to the Holocaust story is surely mythic in this regard, making condemnable heretics of those who deny.
But popularly, a myth is a fairy-tale, a fiction, and I don’t question the veracity, or the horror of the Shoah. The reality of Holocaust denial fits in perfectly with the stupidity of the age which questions even the Moon landings; such is a healthy skepticism toward the stories of authority taken to an extreme and absurd level. We live at a time when some believe in the literalness of the Bible, that people lived with dinosaurs, and that perhaps Jesus only lived a thousand years ago. It is doubtful that Ahmadinejad is sophisticated enough to mean the anthropological sense of mythology when referring to those events.
But my problem is essentially based on the fact that I have no reason to believe anything I’m ever told by Western governments in general with regard to foreign policy. Since childhood I’ve been told that political leaders on the other side of the planet are generally untrustworthy and/or crazy. And because everything nowadays seems to be about the other side of the planet, I was left with cognitive dissonance when I heard Mike Wallace interview the President of Iran, as he did last August (and available in the two mp3s below). Because Mr. Ahmadinejad sounds saner than my own political leaders.
Wha? I mean, listen closely to the interviews: at one point Ahmadinejad says to Wallace (who prompted him to be more sound-bitey) that all of his questions require book length answers. What North American politician would say such a thing? ‘The problem that President Bush has is that in his mind he wants to solve everything with bombs. The time of The Bomb is in the past, it’s behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue, and cultural exchanges’. Who the fuck said that!?
Now, with props to my culture’s conditioning, who knows if he was just putting on a show of reasonableness for the Western cameras. We are told continually that these foreign leaders are like that: crafty propagandists who seduce our liberal left-wingers with their talk of international justice and wanting to do good things for their people. But we know The Truth, because our warmongering political elite have deemed to tell us The Real Story in between all of the secrets they keep. These leaders in the next hemisphere want to nuke us, they hate our freedom, they’re insane and hateful, unenlightened and ignorant, and they regularly flaunt international laws. They are also undemocratic and barbaric, because their elections are either rigged or the wrong people (Hamas) win. Further, when they execute their past tyrants they don’t do it tastefully.
Worst of all, they’re all anti-Semtic and want to destroy Israel, which is another way of saying they are Latter Day Nazis and thus we’re in another Just War against genocidal fascists. In the midst of this snake pit there is Israel, and the Israeli Cabinet, we need to remember, is along with the Pope and the American President, infallible; all graced by God with the ability to never be wrong about anything.
On Freedom of Expression
As I’ve said, I’m being extremely generous in assuming that Mr. Ahmadinejad could be more intelligent than he is portrayed. But such an example, based on an uncommon view, removes my argument from the realm of shared experience from which we should be debating ideas about free expression. The controversial issues of our time are discussed based on common understanding and misunderstandings, and it’s important that we debate within those limits, rather than resort to extreme examples which make everything hypothetical fast.
Abortion is the example that comes readily to mind – growing up in the 1980s and hearing about Henry Morgentaler in the news, and even once participating in a junior high school debate on the subject, the pro-choice contingent regularly argued for cases of rape, incest, and maternal health concerns as deserving abortions. I haven’t checked out the stats, but I’ll hazard a guess that over 90% of abortions performed in North America have nothing to do with those examples. Common knowledge – which may be ignorant and flawed granted – suggests that most abortions are a form of birth control. To hedge around that by arguing the extremes keeps the debate from really being held in the first place, and thus the camps can remain unconvinced by the other’s position.
American commentators see free speech as a sacrosanct right, and as a result have one of the most intolerant and ignorant cultures on the planet. But that is their self-described right. The United States gift to the world seems to have been the enlarge definition of rights to include the right to degrade, discredit and humiliate oneself to a state of unreserved indignity. Anna Nicole Smith had the good fortune to die this past week to provide me with her example. The idealists of the U.S. make it a point to defend the offensive and vulgar as a part of this right, and perhaps here I shouldn’t remind you that vulgar came from the Latin word for common, as I want to try and elevate the common to think of our common capacity for intelligence and compassion rather than our current and common psychopathologies. It is to this end that we need free expression defended: so that we are able to judge things for ourselves.
Our position in Canada is a more intolerant view on intolerance. We accept limits to free-speech which includes anti-hate speech laws. This is meant to prevent harm, and as I understand it, our Supreme Court allowed this by stating that some forms of speech are not worth defending.
A case in point is Holocaust denial: questioning the interpretation of the evidence is one thing, but what is the motivation behind it? The Jews have a right to mythologize (anthropologically) the story, and why should any of the rest of us care? When did the phrase ‘mind your own business’ fall out of favour? I think I know the answer to my rhetorical question, and it’s basically the one favored by Ahmadinejad and his fellow skeptics, one that prefers to dehumanize Jews with the word ‘Zionist’. I don’t think I need to get into it. I think the point raised by the Supreme Court’s decision is essentially it isn’t worth the debate, and that in fact it could be perceived as harmful to engage in it.
Somehow (and I think this has remained largely unexplained and unexplored) we can enjoy a freedom of expression without regularly crossing the line into hate speech. Seldom is anyone investigated or charged: you really have to make an effort to be that offensive. Or one has to be basically poking a bee’s nest: posting calls for Bush to be assassinated online, creating cartoons of Muhammed as a terrorist and the like. As free expression those examples are a waste of the freedom, since it contributes nothing to a discussion and is really only retrogressively ignorant.
How do we manage to use our freedom of expression productively when and if we do? I think it comes from our appreciation for those who offend in ways that increase our capacity for all of expression by showing us a new idea, a new way of life, and a new way of thinking. But we are wary and even intolerant of those who want to limit our expression, or limit our innate sense of progress toward a better world, through the expression of their retrogressive views. In other words: blowing away a stale old convention and offending conservatives by doing so rocks; bringing about the downfall of civilization with a medieval attitude and mindset does not. Somehow we understand what constitutes this through a language of behavior rooted in our common experience. This is what makes conservatives so defensive: they know when they’ve been beat by a new expression. It used to be rock n’ roll: now it’s their teenagers using abbreviation, emoticons, and chatting online with strangers.
While we are united by a common grammar of speech, so too we are united by a common grammar of behaviour. This has been in the past referred to as bourgeois values and considered worth rebelling against, and thus movements created a type of poetry of misbehavior which expanded our own vocabularies of affect. But within these values is a core set of ideas about how we should treat one another, a common value set which sees the benefit to the whole at the individual’s expense.
Consider littering. Off hand, I’m sure we all agree that littering isn’t really a good thing. We’ll define it as saying it’s the introduction of garbage into a public space meant to be shared by all. We’ll further define garbage as something unwanted by someone. Thus, our definition here of littering is the introduction, of something unwanted, into a public space.
But what if this unwelcome introduction of something unwanted is called art by the litterer? Then it’s an intervention. Then, that cigarette cellophane you just dropped on the sidewalk is a performance. According to the art-rules I should shut up now, because the recontextualization destroys it as litter and makes it a human expression that should be nurtured, encouraged, and supported by art council grants. But here I really want to link littering to graffiti and say that because some people consider it unwelcome it is also a form of littering, but it’s one that I personally support as a human attempt at the beautification of plain (plane?) architecture.
While we all understand why we shouldn’t litter as part of our common knowledge, we also understand the deal with most abortions and why hate-speech could be criminal. We don’t need freedom of expression – or whatever other freedoms we enjoy – to be defended by extreme examples, because all laws, all social agreements, all freedoms exist first as a social convention in common knowledge and it is from this basis that the state feels it has the authority to police them. The fragmentation of our society into specialized interest groups is perhaps where we began to disagree about what should be legal and what shouldn’t be. Our common knowledge – our vulgarity – has been reduced to extreme forms of behavior and reduced in intelligence to something less than our potential making us more undignified than some animals.
The challenge has always been to incorporate the deviant into the conventional: this pattern has always seemed to be about the dominant sanctioning another – minority’s – convention as harmless rather than a sudden revaluation of the dominant’s morals. The arguments raised by Christopher Hitchens in his defense of the ‘freedom of denial’ in essence is of allowing that process to continue: for the dominant to not become so self-satisified that they refuse to consider the other’s point of view. But it also seems that we have reached examples of extreme perspectives that the dominant decided long ago were not sanctionable. Holocaust denial is one, as is sex with kids and animals. The recent Sundance film festival featured a film in which a 12 year old girl was raped, and another was a documentary on bestiality. My thoughts are essentially: do we really need to have that discussion? Are we so intellectually and emotionally bankrupt that we have to resort to those expressions for stimulation? It turns out that no distributor wants to buy the Dakota Fanning movie Hounddog and all I can think is thank god.
Ultimately, this is all about the strangeness of language: how a set of sounds, strung together a certain way, can have such intense psychological and intellectual effects. Words uttered or read can make the heart leap or fall, can be emotionally devastating or immensely uplifting, and it’s all just a bunch of sounds or a bunch of shapes on a surface. Through this, one mind interacts with another and our sense of what’s going in our world – that intersection of imagination and environment – grows until we eventually are changed people: more sophisticated, more learned, more conversant. We have a bigger bag of tricks and fuller experience of life. The freedom of speech is also the freedom to be exposed to ideas that we don’t agree with, so that we aren’t held back from the mysteriously transformative power of hearing or reading words. But a case can be made that some of this has the potential to be retrogressive and counterproductive, making us more stupid. Inasmuch as the state tries to do this for us, they should have better things to do, but I think it is also true that they don’t need to control what we think about things because that’s already done by a televised culture of idiocy. – Timothy
I was indecisive about going to see the Mathew Barney movie, because
I didn’t want to have to kill the time between getting off work and seeing the movie, which would have entailed
the claustrophobia of being stuck in a room, in a seat, in a sold out theatre for two hours, with hipsters
Today I bought
a new bottle of after shave balm which came with a promotional stick of lip balm
a new shaving brush
a new bottle of eye drops
I bought these things on my morning break. For my afternoon break I read
Lee Seigel’s review/historical essay on Norman Mailer’s new book
Norman Mailer and I share a birthday with Justin Timberlake. Justin Timberlake turned
26
in Montreal, where he was singing after performing in Toronto on Tuesday. Today is the third anniversary of the infamous wardrobe malfunction.
Justin Timberlake was born three years earlier than Mailer’s age if we begin to count in 1900; that is, 1981. Norman Mailer turned
84
because he was born in 1923. If you add two to four you get Justin’s 6 and if you take away six from the eight you get the 2. If you take the the two and three and from Mailer’s birth year and flip them around and you get back to the beginning, which is
The opening was fantastic. I was so glad to be there. Toronto’s been too boring for too long. It needed an injection of pompous pretension. Red carpet, open bar and delicately pretty glammed out art girls. Also, I find I’m now of an age when the songs that were hits when I was younger have come ’round again to be hipster favorites. But I’m also confused about who Thrush Holmes is, and I think that’s precisely the point. It wasn’t about the art, it was about the party for the art.
Proust has already come up twice – first in Taylor’s discussion, but also it the title of the Gordon Bell presentation. What better way to introduce Mr. Mee? The truth is I wanted to publish a review of Mr. Mee in the summer of 2005, and it is a novel I read in the summer of 2004, but obviously didn’t get around to it until now. Mr. Mee is a novel of three story-lines, with two of the major players being Rousseau and Proust; Rousseau as a character, and Proust as an idea. It is set a decade ago, in 1997, during the early years of the internet – which is an important element to the fiction. The eponymous character of Mr. Mee is a retired, naive academic who buys a computer in order to use the nascent World Wide Web to try and track down an obscure book. In a Borgesian allusion, Rosier’s Encyclopaedia has been referenced in the bibliography of a book he brought home from a leisurely afternoon at the used bookstore.
Andrew Crumey shifts the scene to tell us more about the Encyclopaedia by bringing us back to 18th Century Paris, and introducing us to two characters, Ferrand and Minard, two down-on-their-luck copyists who are commissioned to copy a bunch of nutty writings by a Mr. Rosier. F & M are named after two people who Rousseau wrote about in his autobiography, and Crumey’s speculation on their backstory, and its consequences were outstanding. This novel is simply intellectually delightful in that regard. Perhaps they had something to do with Rouseau’s famed paranoia? Maybe they thought Rousseau a murderer? And perhaps their paranoia was fueled by their work fair-copying this work of an 18th Century genius who’d thought up 20th Century quantum physics and binary computers in 18th Century terms? (One of my favorite parts of the book describes Minard’s construction of a digita-binary computer out of string and bits of paper, and he is heard to complain about needing more memory. It seems that even in the 1760s, it was desirable to have more RAM).
In the 1990s, a professor lies in a hospital bed, contemplating his life over the past several months, and the possibility of his death. He had been a professor of Proust, and had come to teach this work of autobiographical literature after an adolescent infatuation with the work of Rousseau. And so, as he writes his memoir, he reflects both on Rousseau and on Proust. This is the tour-de-force of the novel. I found this the most satisfying, and appreciated it’s intricate subtleties. The professor comes across as just another dime-a-dozen mediocre academic who live their quotidian lives a students and commentators of past human achievement. The Proust-bug has not yet bitten me, and it was here I learned of how Proust described his magnum opus as being ‘about an I who isn’t I’. The introduction of this thought in the professor’s memoir raises the question of how much of his text is about an I that isn’t he. The overall impression is that, faced with impending death, Dr. Petrie has at last given it a try, written his work of autobiography about and I who isn’t I, inspired by his mastery of knowledge of these two masters of the art. Dr. Petrie ignores whatever sense of failure that has brought him to this point – the broken heart, his cancer, the sense that it was his attempt to initiate an affair with a student which brought on the illness. Instead of being cowed by a sense of mediocrity in comparison to his literary heroes, he gives it a go and in so doing constructs a literature of the self. The added poignancy comes from the embarrassed recounting of the infatuation which he blames for the illness out of a sort of hubris, and it is perhaps through this honest memory that his work becomes literary and becomes the final accomplishment of his life.
And perhaps here it is worth remembering that a year ago, James Frey was in the news for his book of autobiography, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone who claims to run a book club to not understand the need to embellish, to lie, to cheat the details as (what used to be called in a more literate age) poetic license.
Crumey’s skill is seen in his ability to weave together the tale of naive Mr. Mee, the octogenarian centre of the story, with the dying professor and the story of Rouseau’s Minard and Ferrand, and in the process, imagine 20th Century theoretical physics in 18th Century terms, remind us of what the internet was like a decade ago, muse on human foibles and the nature of autobiographical literature. Perhaps an even more central thesis to the story is that consciousness comes from writing, or at least, from the type of contextualization of memory that can come from writing. If we are not telling the story, than it didn’t really have to happen. Ultimately it ties into the nature of memory in our lives and the nature of identity as a narrated self.
What begins loose falls into patterns
Because people are essentially lazy
So they develop patterns/rituals to do the most with the least amount of energy
They develop the easy efficient ways, which become their rituals, their techniques, their patterns
What was once chaotic and haphazard has been systematized and has become a formality
Formalities continue until they are rigid, and exist on strength of memory as tradition
Which is to say, the movement of an inertia
Like the train, once it has gathered speed, will not stop quickly.
It is pushed along by the weight behind it, until it is overcome by the subtle forces of friction,.
The weight of memory pushes along a tradition, yet once the efficiency that was offered is lost,
The pattern in useless and breaks; the ritual is over, the tradition dies, the inertia has been worn out by the new force of inefficiency, its friction.
A new looseness comes about and the cycle begins again.
This is in our languages, in the ways we share our thoughts,
In speech, writing and dress, in music and art and design.
The formalities of the 18th Century to that of the 19th and to that of the 20th.
The formalities break and common-ness takes over for a while, until the common becomes the new formality. Latin’s dominance gave way to the Vulgar. The pamphleteers of the 18th Century didn’t write in the scholastic language. The bloggers of the 21st Century are not writing in the formal way of academia and corporate press-releases.
But already, new blogger conventions are developing which will one day give way to a rebellion of the common, a new looseness to revive and remake that old order.
[…] Also on the urban-culture front, Timothy Comeau’s marvellous magpie project GoodReads links in its latest edition to an Los Angeles Times piece about the “art party” issue in the L.A. scene. Timothy snappily connects it with the conversations about the nightclubbing-meets-participatory-aesthetics conundrum that have been going on in Toronto for several years, including my essay in the Coach House uTOpia 2 book.
Goodreads.ca sort of began three years ago today. I say that because it really began in November 2003, and I worked on prepping the site for a January launch. Today marks the day I sent the first email to a small number of people. It grew from there. The domain name was only registered in March of 2004, and the server space to host it was also purchased at that time.
2004 – Goodreads is established. The pattern of theme, link and quote from the article in question is developed. The list structure develops into a blog on the web, as I wanted to offer an RSS feed and at the time it was the only way I could do it. This blog format goes against what I originally conceived would be a simple archive page. During the next eighteen months, I achieve the goal of growing the list by %1000.
2005 – Goodreads homepage is redesigned. The increasing presence online of video and audio shifts Goodreads from being primarily textual to taking advantage of the post-modernist understanding of all media being a form of text which is ‘read’, that is, interpreted. (Goodreads could be renamed Goodinterpretations).
2006 – Goodreads is a mixture of the ‘traditional’ link structure and the super-duper compilation. The focus begins to shift from ‘making people aware’ to documenting my interpretation and mindfulness of the web. Goodreads begins to incorporate YouTube and Google Video compilation pages.
Over the past couple of days I set up timothycomeau.com. Registered the domain name, bought the server space on Sat. 6 January 2007; most of this blog was set up on Sun. 7 January 2007. When I was asked on Friday what I planned to do on the weekend, I didn’t feel like answering ‘webdesign’ since I wasn’t sure if I would be doing this. Further, I didn’t expect to be a little hungover yesterday since I had a good time the night before, somewhat unexpectedly.
Because those things are just habits. You are not your face or your body or your thoughts. You are not your hair colour or your name or your job or your memories. We fall into the habit of thinking this is so. We fall into a pattern of me and mine which isn’t the case. What is the case is an awareness that things stick to. The awareness gets confused, or doesn’t know any better. Me and mine and our nose and our handwriting. Surely a bubble of thinking produced this text a century ago. Surely a memory was once formed of the writing, a memory now disappeared into another death. So many now, like the leaves on underground trees. Art fell apart. It became a Rolls Royce for the pretenders. The real rich bastards bought real Rolls Royce’s, not paintings, not art. Only young and naive and ignorant people went to art galleries, looking at the shit while listening to Montreal indie bands on the iPods. Art was another – or remained! – pretentious folly. So this literature is read by another one, lost to unemployment and the needs of the identity economy.
The gods of Rome stand naked in a kitchen freezer, shivering and covering their genitals with a human modesty. Haven’t we been dead long enough? they ask. No, says the dishwasher, picking up the bucket of peeled potatoes in water. No, not dead long enough. You can’t come out until we’re ready to feel bad about another holy holocaust. Prepare your guilt trips while you wait, and plan for the memory centres and the monopoly on our grief once the colonialism of Jesus is over. Until then, you stand here humiliated blue-white and starved, while we run things over the internet. Until then, fuck yourselves and have new Herculeses. Their chorus is now one of woe. But they are admonished. That opera trope is so passé.
They are fed with oranges and blue berries while they wait. But on their return, no television special. They are D-list celebrities. No one can figure out if that is Zeus or Vulcan by Jove.
The tale of them all is that there are no more tales. No more cellphones, no more art, no more laptops or iPods or clouds or geese or canoes or pretty girls for trophy wives and there are no more lives. The Universe takes a breather on the Human realm. A bit too fucked up there it concludes. But it isn’t so bad. It’s just they let the standards slip. And they paid for it.
Whose standards?
Two ends of the ego bar: on one end, the egolessness of Buddhism. Perhaps this best belongs to the left side. On the right, the glorification of the ego.
Art and anti-art: Buddhism and anti-buddhism. One glorifies and the other nullifies, and they stand in contrast to one another as technologies of dignity. I tried the art thing for my 20s. It lead to restless nights of loneliness and poverty and feelings of worthlessness in the grand scheme of things. To inflate the ego and the sense of self-importance I conceived of grand projects and felt important when people used my phone number or email address to harass me with things I didn’t care about. Spam and garbage. I tried art and the glorification of the ego and found my ego attached to a mirror image of a handsome face and a slim body, this world of my early 20s, when I was in artschool. I didn’t have to try very hard. My physical attractiveness meant I could add heartbreak to my glorification and people gave me the cute pass. Important women tried to seduce me and would confide in me. What then happened but time and food and sitting too long in front of computers and desks? Too many words read, too many written, and everything slowed downed into a soft body, pudgy with middle age, and no more cute pass. Your brains aren’t enough for this world. So what if you’re smart? That won’t buy the trophy wives to houseclean the suburb home. And so to confront this mystery of a changed world, one sits and meditates and tried to internalize the view that all this is an egg shell borrowed for a swim amidst the deluded, the hateful, and the ignorant. But no more pictures! No more art! Instead I want fine embroidery, quilted patterns, the craftsmanship of darned socks. More handmade things for this world please. And enough with the plastic crap.
But she is plastic, especially in the ways that she loves me. Concealed from each other’s paranoia, lust in the time of the Plague; we fuck and suck and all isn’t what it once was. Hair is now optional and comes only on amateur models. For professional quality one can might as well fuck a rubber doll ordered off the internet and alive not at all. Necrophillia passing off as plastophillia. It’s all the same nowadays. Please love me!This is the game. So in what world do we live? It’s time that I gave up. It all began to feel so fake; artificial contrived, pretentious. Music was one of the only things of which I was carefully ignorant to remain. If I learned too much about it I knew it would cease to be enjoyable: a balm, a calm, a lay in a dark November night.
I’ll feign illness and lay in bed for an hour, take up the pen and write suicide notes or letters threatening to kill the emperor. That way people will visit me, and if I really play my cards right, I’ll get three square meals a day, a bed of my own, and not have to sleep on grates.
This then is the legacy of a time of memory. Another world war for the newspapers. More of the same hatred and delusion and greed. This society took up the cultivation of discord and evil and I was asked to be successful within it. To validate it by my own Rolls Royce, my own Ferrari, my own trophy wife with store bought tits and an appearance on Oprah. I was asked to succeed at these things through art. Celebrity movies, incomprehension. Be fucking famous. Be another star. Because we have drowned out the out the real ones with light pollution and we are building a new constellation. Be a star for our sky, for our world, for our lie.
Am I allowed to say no thank you and go back to my newspaper pen & ink game? To reverse a thousand years of karma with a phrase so simple and mean, to say, no I’ll not be famous today, fifteen minutes is far too long already.
There is in this a simple thing really. A forgiveness to the elderly for not dying sooner: for fucking everything up with TV and laziness.
But asserted with a simple pin. In short I was afraid. My how my hair is growing thin. But this is a message to the old and the dead. There is no new crop of scholar arising to understand. Tell me if anything was ever done. Read. Pick up and read. Recite, in the name of the Creator. Recite that in the beginning was the world and it was without form and that it described that all life is suffering and that there’s an end to suffering and that it costs only three monthly payments of 19.99 so act now by calling 1-800. And all this is the end, my simple friend, the end of all our simple plans. I think I’ve been too successful at embarrassing people. And this now keeps me a quiet mouse still growing into a lion.
~
There is still a moon in the sky and lights in the rooms. Where there was once darkness there is now a television screen with animated images and all those stories. Entertainment as religion; the thing that our ancestors did and their’s did and the world is now too complicated for Shakespeare and talk radio, even the talk radio from France on philosophy. What stories! For my fat hands a fat pen. A Rolls Royce kind of kind. A big black car. Wealth and power. Don’t forget it. Quick! Quick! Take my picture for I am writing with a fountain pen! Aren’t I clever and beautiful and literary? Why not talk farming instead, since I know so little of it? Why not talk astronomy? The poets studied looser verse and the ladies rolled their eyes. Quel surprise.
~
Eventually someone will speak. Let’s forget about the Greek Gods freezing in the freezer. I still see them looking like Ego Schieles as painted by Picasso during his Blue Period of a hundred years ago. Or, I see them as Holocaust survivors about to be liberated projected from blue film. Starving, hysterical, naked, their ribs showing, awaiting the fall of monotheism and the neon dawn, but they are also just beings who should go back to their own realm. Leave us psychos alone. We have an ecosystem to ruin. Thwart the rebirth of a billion daevas. Because we’re afraid one of these screaming brats will be the next great king, queen, or talk show host. Whan! For six months, whan! And the nipples and the bottles and the diapers until one day there’s an enlightenment or a contract in Hollywood, signed with a ball-point pen and for ladies, dear ladies, a trip to the the tit man and a whitening of the smile.
And all this while prostrations
Before the personal trainer,
the new priest of a new ritual.
Self-worship demands we become our own gods
before an audience of mirrors.
But here I am with a chocolate bar. I need to wipe my mouth. I am unloved still and poverty and paunch contribute to the glamour of my humiliation. I was asked once to be a star and I said no thanks because my hair is growing thin and I did not want to be a butterfly preserved at the end of a pin. I wanted instead simple lives and simple pleasures. To wash dishes in front of a window which looked out to a landscape – grass, trees, the stereotype. But no! To Canada we go! For we live in cities and towns and it’s all graffiti and spit. Fuck it. Let us go then, you and I, a beauty stirring my stick. I’ve given up on sex and seek it only as an intimacy. I’ve had too many orgasms already to feel any biological need for another one. Special words for special feeling. An art really. But forcing it out of you … words to your silent attitude. Words and your sentences left hanging like so many limp and flaccid plants left unwatered by the fellow hired to feed the cats. Oh fuck it, it’s not like you understand anyway. There is music in the mind as there is method in the madness. I’ll grow a big mustache and say I’m ahead of my time. Dinner was over at quarter to nine.
As I mentioned in the Goodreads sent out on October 16th, I’ve prepared a transcript of the Ideas episode Economics and Social Justice, which was released today as a podcast.
Despite Mr Sacco’s acceptably flawed English, I found this to be a remarkably good listen, and I especially liked his take on what the Toronto School would call the Economics of Positional Goods. By this I mean that Mark Kingwell has been known in the past year to talk of positional goods which is borrowing from the work of his fellow University of Toronto philosophy colleague Joseph Heath, who presented on his book, The Rebel Sell two years ago with his co-author Andrew Potter, a transcript of which I made available on Goodreads some time ago and herein again for obvious thematic reasons.
In addition, because Sacco mentions in his presentation that there is a strong incentive in our culture toward stupidity, since it makes you a more pliable consumer, I was reminded of Alvin Toffler’s talk which was broadcast on TVO’s Big Ideas on September 30th. His talk was for his new book, Revolutionary Wealth where he argued that we have formed a new civilization, one I would argue which is unhealthily obsessed with the pursuit of a string of digits; Sacco would argue that we have tied our identity to these digits, administered by banks and governments, and see them as measures of our potency. Toffler argues that our society’s structures have fallen out of sync, where business is moving at an extreme rate, adapting readily to and creating change in our world but education is the dinosaur, not having kept up the pace and still teaching a curriculum designed to produce efficient factory and corporate workers.
Sacco thinks we need to invest in ourselves – that is educate ourselves – in order to remove ourselves from the rat race of competitive consumption which is tied to what he calls the economics of identity. What’s a little shocking is how this new and cool theory of economics – the economics of identity – is really rather old school. In an essay found in his Collected Works (which I tried to get on Goodreads last year but they wouldn’t let me), Northrop Frye wrote:
Still, the problem of leisure and boredom is an educational problem. Education may not solve it, but nothing else will. Schools, churches, clubs, and whatever else has any right at all to be called educational, need to think of educating for leisure as one of our central and major social needs. And education is a much broader business than studying certain subjects, though it includes that. Television, newspapers, films, are all educational agencies, though what they do mostly is more like dope peddling than like serious education. Education reflects the kind of society we have. If society is competitive and aggressive and ego-centered, education will be too; and if education is that way, it’ll produce a cynical and selfish society, round and round in a vicious circle. Intelligent and dedicated people can break this circle in a lot of places if they try hard.
What makes boredom boring? It’s not just a matter of not being busy enough. Take a girl who’s dropped out of college because the slick magazines told her she wasn’t being feminine unless she threw her brains away. What with running a house and three children and outside activities, she hasn’t a minute of free time, but she’s bored all the same. Being bored is really the feeling that there’s something missing inside oneself. When someone gets that feeling, his instinct is to feel that something outside him can supply what’s missing. This is what inspires the chase for what are called status symbols. A man struggles to get an expensive car or a mink coat for his wife in the hope that people will judge him by these things instead of by himself. One trouble with these things is that they wear out so fast. In fact, our economy partly depends on their wearing out fast. As soon as anything is recognized to be a status symbol, it begins to look silly, and we have to start chasing something else. Suppose a man wants to collect pictures, not because he likes pictures, but because it’s an approved thing to do. He’s soon fold that certain kinds of pictures are fashionable and others aren’t. But as soon as he’s got his house filled with canvases a hundred feet square covered with red paint, the fashion changes to pop art, and there he is with last year’s model of status symbols. It’s the same with all the distracting activities. A man is bored because he bores himself.
That was circa 1963. When Sacco speaks of ‘compensatory consumption’ he’s really talking about people trying to buy their way out of boredom.
But, you know, we do buy our way out of boredom all the time: we buy computers to do websites and Goodreads with, and we buy books to read which stimulate and educate. An Educated Imagination is what Pier Luigi Sacco is really calling for, and to that end here is some content by which to further that pursuit. – Timothy
‘When the individual has reached a hundred years of age, he is able to do without love and friendship. Illness and inadvertent death are not things to be feared. He practices one of the arts, or philosophy or mathematics, or plays a game of one-handed chess. When he wishes, he kills himself. When a man is the master of his own life, he is also the master of his death.’
‘Is that a quotation?’ I asked.
‘Of course. There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations’.
-Jorge Luis Borges, A Weary Man’s Utopia (1975)
Somehow the world has become a mediocre comic book, as predictable as a Star Trek episode. I grew up watching Star Trek and still love it for its graphic design, but it was never embarrassed about cannibalizing from its past storylines, and eventually it got so bad that ten minutes into an episode you could anticipate the entire plot-line. But this is an effect not confined to a show like Star Trek, it is true of almost anything on television. I was surprised when I read Chapter 18 of John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards earlier this year in the way he blended his view of art history and it’s failure to adequately resolve itself to television, which he saw as the logical conclusion of centuries of attempts at realistic image making. Image making, he thought, is tied to our desires for rituals. And TV combines animated images with ritual plot-lines, as predictable to contemporary viewers as those reciting along with a priest as he holds up the host. As he wrote:
People are drawn to television as they are to religions by the knowledge that they will find there what they already know. Reassurance is consistency and consistency is repetition. Television – both drama and public affairs – consists largely of stylized popular mythology in which there are certain obligatory characters who must say and do certain things in a particular order. After watching the first minute of any television drama, most viewers could lay out the scenario that will follow, including the conclusion. Given the first line of banter in most scenes, a regular viewer could probably rhyme off the next three or four lines. Nothing can be more formal, stylized and dogmatic than a third-rate situation comedy or a television news report on famine in Africa. There is more flexibility in a Catholic mass or in classic Chinese opera.
He went on to say, and I think this is a kicker given how it was probably written in the 1980s:
The rise of CNN (Cable News Network) canonizes the television view of reality as concrete, action-packed visuals. Wars make good television, providing the action is accessible and prolonged. The Middle East, for example, is an ideal setting for television war. Cameras can be permanently on the spot, and a fixed scenario of weekly car bombs, riots and shelling ensures that the television structure will have ongoing material.
(It makes Steven Colbert’s joke about this past summer’s Israel-Lebanese war more than just a joke but a perfectly conscious reflection of the reality of the situation). In addition, the violence on television reflects a long Western tradition in depicting violence, seen in graphic mediaeval crucifixions and the tortured damned we are familiar with from those seemingly unenlightened times.
But from the enlightened times we got Goya’s image, the sleep of reason producing monsters. As Mark Kingwell points out in his essay ‘Critical Theory and Its Discontents’ the image’s caption can be read two ways, as either ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’ or ‘the dream of reason produces monsters’.1 John Ralston Saul, with Voltaire’s Bastards took the later interpretation for his thesis. But the experience of this decade is one of the first reading: the thoughtlessness of the times producing predictable nightmares.
~
Everything has gotten so insane that peace and quiet and non-interaction certainly has a lot more appeal. No need to answer the same old questions about how I am, which are rhetorical and meaningless, no need to tell the same boring stories about myself or the state of my life, no need to feel the peer pressure of conforming to someone else’s idea of who I am, who I should be, or how I should be. It is better in this decade to withdraw and watch operas on DVD (Wagner’s The Ring), or famous TV shows (Battlestar Gallactica is like such a masterpiece); and to avoid browsing websites too much because it just seems to add to the sense that everything has gone to bullshit, as MacLeans seems to think as well. So I missed the whole beauty video thing until the day before I saw it on the front page of the Toronto Star, and as I’ve been adjusting over the past month to a 6.30am wake up time to become a ‘corporate minion of patriarchy’ (my Halloween costume) I’m not so eager to go a’gathering for goodreads. I’ve been warning you all for months now that this project isn’t what it used to be, and that will continue to be true in the future. This list began small enough that I knew my audience – drank and laughed with some of you in the past – but now has become anonymous and my motivations for doing it continue to be some sick sense of responsibility to do my part to inform whoever might come a’googlin. I should be much more selfish and egotistical to fit in properly I know. But my work on the web in the past has come from a desire to document, and at this time I would like to use this list to promote and to document for whatever that’s worth.
Death of a President was released in North America on Friday, and it probably won’t be in theatres for long. Not that it matters, because it will attain a deserved cult-status on DVD or streamed from wherever. First of all, having never seen George W. Bush in person he has always been nothing but an animated image to me. Real through portrayal and the delusion of the animated image, and so fitting, I think, to see that image manipulated into another version of a potential reality borrowed from many months from now. The skill of the digital effects became apparent very quickly; ten minutes into it I recognized it as a masterpiece, a shockingly effective use of Photoshop-like tech, and a devastating commentary on current global-american-centric-politics. I mean, what other President of the United States has inspired a fictional yet realistic depiction of his assassination while still in office to the extant that the film is presented as an historical documentary on the subject?This blending of time – watching images from a future, depicting an event from a year from now, presented as some bleeding-heart leftist documentary typically shown on CBC Newsworld on Sunday nights, twists itself into the cold water blast of just how stupid everything has gotten (given how the movie is built out of the current media clichés, from the dialogue right up the structure) but also how we’re caught up in a television dream dictating reality to us. The film hits all the right points, with an eerie accuracy, from the deluded missus posing as Bush’s speechwriter saying how he was somehow connected to God, to the political backdrop of North Korea and Iran. The speeches have been written and the players have taken to the stage and Shakespeare’s famous line has never seemed more true.
And for that reason, for the sheer fictionalization of our reality, this moment in later history which seems real because it is on TV, real through portrayal, this film will also be must-see viewing for Presidential historians, both present and future. I am compelled to write about it now, to time-stamp this text with the current date, so that there is evidence to future researchers that this movie came out a year before the October 2007 events that it depicts. I would like to think that this movie will still be watched in future years, long after the Bush administration; as a sociological study of this decade, a study in documentary narrative, as an art film, and as an historical marker of the transformative power of Photoshop-like effects. I got a glismpe watching this movie of the media-scape of the upcoming century and felt future-shock. Nuanced political discourse through fictional history, which only highlights our current confusion between memory and thought. This film is cultural evidence that we can only seem to think through the ‘hindsight is always 20/20’ trope, and that retrospective documentaries have become so prevalent in the age of the self-absorbed baby-boomer-at-the-controls-of-everything (and hence a narcissistic mediascape on their politics, youth, and classic album collections) that it’s only fitting to examine a presidency’s attack on civil liberties through the genre.
The CBS Sunday Morning program had a piece on Oct 29 on the beauty video and Photoshop – explaining what young creative people take for granted to the old foggies who watch that sentimental sunday morning sunshine stuff. And the key is what young people are taking for granted versus what the old foggies running the show have in their minds about our future. An older person close to me the other day posited that I might live long enough to see one of Toronto’s main traffic arteries – the Don Valley Parkway – turned into a double-decker highway. As if allowing for more greenhouse gas emitting machines would be an adequate solution to our traffic problems, a vision completely oblivious to environmental concerns. I countered I’d much rather see a better public transit infrastructure built. But of course, I understand where this idea comes from. It’s classic ‘cars are a great and my identity as a man is tied to the sense of freedom they bring me and the teenage sense of fuck you I never got over’. It’s the same mid-twentieth century mentality that you get from politicians when they promote the need for more people to study math and science, because not only is there a space race and we have to prove that consumerist democracy rocks, but because we need all those future engineers to retro-fit these highways into double-decker monstrosities. Ah these old people: it’s enough to wish them all dead, or at least look forward to the future when they’ve left the scene and we can build the world into something more fair and beautiful. They all gave up after Bobby was assassinated, and you can watch all about it on November 23rd. What a contrast. We’re in a situation when eloquent and visionary politicians are now part of a dreamy past, while our present is made up of inarticulate war-mongering folks notable for their lack of vision. That doesn’t seem to me a sign of a healthy state of affairs.
Wishing a certain old-foggie dead is precisely what director Gabriel Range has tapped into. I saw it at a 3:50 matinee with four other people. That is to say, I went alone and there were only three other people in the audience. I’m not sure if that’s worthy of mention – seeing late afternoon matinees on Sunday afternoons isn’t popular enough to be stereotypical. But it also contributed to the feeling that I was watching a secret masterpiece living up to art’s typical response from consumerist culture. They were told to not watch it by the media who readily quoted the likes of Hillary Clinton who thought it was ‘despicable‘. It fits into the thoughts I’ve had lately about Hitler’s famous degenerate art show: Hitler, as John Carey pointed out in his 2005 book What Good are the Arts? was being populist with that exhibit, selling the public their own prejudices toward modern art. But there is a theory about how art is a psychological reflection of the zeitgeist, capturing the spirit of the age, and it seems to be ironic that Hitler, in promoting this to mock it, provided an historical marker for modernist art and highlighted the degeneracy of the society which legitimately elected him in 1933. It was degenerate art made within a degenerate society and Hitler unwittingly held up a mirror thinking it a spotlight. Whenever politicians start making pronouncements on cultural products, one has to think something significant is going on which will need explaining to future generations: that it is an art historical moment.
We’re supposed to all know the game. It’s what makes a film like Death of President possible: string together all the tv documentary clichés for an audience made sophisticated enough by an ambient televised environment to not be confused by the fiction. But of course I say that as someone who saw it with four other people, a film which as far as box-office measures go, did not exist, and as someone with the capacity to reflect on what I saw. As I walked out of the theatre I heard the terrified screams coming from the next theatre-room, looking back I saw the poster for Saw III. Of course Geogre Bush is President in a time when watching violence is what enough people want to do to make it the top film this weekend. You might point out a horror movie is appropriate for Halloween, but Halloween is only appropriate for children. The popularity of violence in whatever manner just highlights our collective immaturity and our inability to grow beyond a mediaeval past, as Bush’s recent moves toward the elimination of habeas corpus show.
JRS wrote: ‘This perpetual motion machine works effortlessly if the flood of images illustrates situations the viewer already understands. That is one of the explanations for the system’s concentration on two or three wars when there are forty or so going on around the world. The others are eliminated because they are less accessible on a long-term basis. Or because the action is less predictable and regular. Or because the issue involved does not fit easily into the West’s over-explained, childlike scenarios of Left versus Right or black versus white. Or because the need for endless images makes television structures unwilling to undertake the endless verbal explanations and nonvisual updates which would be required for the other thirty-seven wars to be regularly presented.’ This was first published in 1992. In the time between now and then, nothing has changed. While the audience have grown more sophisticated, so has television’s methods at keeping the conversation simple. But for me, there is another question, and that is, why? Why is any of this important? Ritual? That alone seems too simple an explanation. I watch TV for the illusion of company and for the occasional good, or big idea.
What is television for? Some will say it’s merely to get us to buy things, but others will say it is to inform. But are we being informed or frustrated? Isn’t anything political on television simply a way of frustrating a democratic citizenship into feelings of impotence when faced with such inane political figures? And isn’t it this sense of frustration precisely what leads to the events depicted in Death of a President? That’s not something you’d get with an uninformed populace, nor perhaps one you’d get if the political machinery actually could register the democratic will of the population. We remain dictated to, told what to think about movies by Hillary Clinton or whatever expert they got hold of at the local university.
I first read Borges’ story, A Weary Man’s Utopia in the winter of 2001 following you know what, when the shit had hit the fan and all the flags were flying. It is the story of a man’s afternoon visit with a fellow in a far distant future. He tells the the fellow
‘In that strange yesterday from which I have come,’ I replied, ‘there prevailed the superstition that between one evening and the next morning, events occur that it would be shameful to have no knowledge of. The planet was peopled by spectral collectives – Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, the Common Market. Almost no one knew the prior history of those Platonic entities, yet everyone was informed of the most trivial details of the latest conference of pedagogues or the imminent breaking off relations between one of these entities and another and the messages that their presidents sent back and forth – composed by a secretary to the secretary, and in the prudent vagueness that the form requires. All this was no sooner read than forgotten, for within a few hours it would be blotted out by new trivialities. Of all functions, that of the politician was without doubt the most public. An ambassador or a minister was a sort of cripple who had to be transported in long, noisy vehicles surrounded by motorcyclists and grenadiers and stalked by eager photographers. One would have thought their feet had been cut off, my mother used to say. Images and the printed word were more real than things. People believed only want they could read on the printed page. The principle, means and end of our singular conception of the world was esse est percipi – “to be is to be portrayed”. In the past I lived in, people were credulous.
I would like to think that in the years since it was published in 1975, people have become less credulous. But the forms of these popular delusions have only aggregated more nuance, so that things are not only read, but heard and seen, and people believe what they read on screens. Or at least the old foggies who are freaked out by Wikipedia seem to think so, severely underestimating the capacities of people to understand the collective nature of the site.
As for politicians being cripples: I recently saw a motorcade come up University Avenue in Toronto and turn onto Queen St – first the chorus of motorbike cops, lead by someone who parked in the center of the intersection, leaping off to perform his ritual in the same manner a parodist would: exaggerated self importance as he held the traffic back, like a romantic hero confronting a tide, and along came the parade of black cars with their two-wheeler escorts. Who was this asshole? I thought. Some celebrity? I still don’t know, although I later heard the Prime Minister was in town. Perhaps it was him. But it seems to me that to parade around in black cars with tinted windows reveals a foolish paranoia: they all think they’re important enough to be assassinated and so hide from us as if we’re all crazy, showing a contempt for the citizenry which is unfair. Leaders shouldn’t hide from us and treat us as if we’re dangerous. But ironically that’s precisely the type of behaviour that leads to the protests they need to be protected from. – Timothy
———————————
1. The essay is found in the book Practical Judgments pages 171-181 and the quote is itself a quote from one of the books he’s reviewing; the orginal thought is attributed to the introduction by David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy in their 1994 book, Critical Theory.
My fellow Canadian CBC listeners, who plug your headphones into the computer at work and stream it as I do, who listen to it in the morning as you type your theses because you’re a television snob; who have come to appreciate the music for the news they introduced earlier this year as something iconic, and who may have fond memories of Peter Gzowski and the opening music to Morningside, you listeners know that Lister Sinclair died today, at age 85, in a Toronto hospital. The news made me think that’s how I’d like to go – in my 80s, with the radio playing Glenn Gould and Mozart in my honour. A good life, well spent, with everyone talking about how learned and kind you were. (Except for dying in a Toronto hospital – since I saw Dying at Grace I’ve felt it would be better to die in a ditch under the stars).
My first encounter with the voice of Lister Sinclair came in the summer of 1991. I was listening to EMF’s one-hit-wonder album that season, the single ‘Unbelievable’ on the endless repeat possible with dub cassette tapes and rewind. I’d work away at my Commodore 64 and listen to Side A and then Side B, and through this learned how to spell the word ‘believe’ since it was a song title. And on one of these songs there was a sample of a BBC Shakespeare radio play with a gravitas accented announcer. I was naive enough at the time to wonder, when I was rolling my radio tuner sometime after 9pm that night, if this voice speaking about nightingales was the voice from the album. Later I’d untangled the confusion but I was hooked to the strangeness of that broadcast, one of the series of things that begin with a certain letter, or something themed around a colour. Anyway, I tuned in at 9 the following night to catch more.
This, my friends, was an example of the CBC being hip, a far cry from George Stroumboulopoulos’ latest hints that he pierced his cock, which is how the CBC is trying to sell it today. Lister Sinclair’s sober weirdness made a much stronger impression on my sense of teenage cool than the middle class punk aesthetic which now passes for hipster ways.
Ideas is running a three part tribute over the next three nights, where it is 9pm local throughout Canada.
In the last Goodreads, sent on Friday, I promoted that evening’s Ideas, and now the voice who once presented its ideas has gone. This Goodreads serves the double purpose of sharing my thoughts on the matter (I hope you don’t mind) and to inform you that the episode on ‘Economics and Social Justice’ which I promoted will be an Ideas podcast on November 20th. In the meantime, I’m working on a transcription from the recording I made, which I’ll post on the site on that date. – Timothy
I may not have written in a long time but today was o.k. PS I’m a Space Ace1.
________________ 1. Space Ace referred to a video game in which I had achieved a high score.
And thus, that is the end of the 1986 Diary entries. I didn’t try to keep a diary again until three years later at age 14, but I ended up destroying that one because I didn’t want to remember that year. Things were better the following year, and it was then that I began to keep notebooks and develop a Journal.
The Facts & Arguments section of last Thursday’s (Sept 7th) Globe & Mail brought this article by Geoffrey Lean to my attention, where it is noted that ‘food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging the world into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures show that this year’s harvest will fail to produce enough to feed everyone on Earth, for the sixth time in the past seven years. Humanity has so far managed by eating its way through stockpiles built up in better times – but these have now fallen below the danger level’.
Earlier in the week I picked up Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap at a used bookstore. This particular copy seems to have been someone else’s review-copy, since I found tucked inside the cover the photocopied blurb for his upcoming title The Upside of Down; Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (to be published October 31st). The blurb offers as a teaser the Prologue, which sets the stage with a reminder of Ancient Rome, which grew too complex and fell because its citizens couldn’t maintain its late stages. Homer-Dixon writes, ‘In this book we’ll discover that our circumstances today are like Rome’s in key ways. Our societies are becoming steadily more complex and often more rigid…Eventually, as occurred in Rome, the stresses will become too extreme, and our societies too inflexible to respond, and some kind of economic or political breakdown is likely to occur. I’m not alone in this view. These days, lots of people have the intuition that the world is going haywire and an extraordinary crisis is coming’.
We are indeed lucky to be thus living in such a time, before the extraordinary crisis. Because it seems to me that when we find ourselves there – maybe in another ten years or so? – won’t we look back with nostalgia to the simpler time of this decade, and pine for the days when old Papa Bush was on TV everynight, making us laugh with his goofy phrasings, and miss the simple-minded certainty offered by the idea that Muslim fanatics want to kill us?
Which is to say that only in a society which has enough food, whose cities aren’t being destroyed by storms, whose children are well-sheltered and well-fed, can we afford the time and resources to let our politicians play boys-with-toys war games. We truly must be living in a utopia, to have the luxury to use our time and money so productively in being afraid of one another.
Because we don’t have an extraordinary crisis to unite us and to force us to work together. Our cities are not being destroyed by storms. There isn’t a plague ravaging continents. We aren’t living with a lead-pipe infrastructure based on an finite resource that we are squandering. There is no asteroid headed our way to force Bruce Willis and Steve Buscemi to become astronauts, nor are there aliens coming to blow up the White House and force President Bush to brush up on his fighter-pilot skills, last used protecting Texan airspace during the Vietnam War (if we don’t count the air-craft carrier thing from a few years back). At the end of the day we can sit back and watch the war-show and the comedic commentaries and look forward to going back to our soul-nurturing jobs in the morning and think, today was a good day. Because the extraordinary crisis is coming, but not already here. We have the luxury of war and terrorism in this decade, and we’d better enjoy it while it lasts.
Meanwhile, commentators like Homer-Dixon, Ronald Wright, and Jared Diamond warn us that things are shaky. This civilization may not survive the 21st Century. Homer-Dixon, in his prologue, writes, ‘Rome’s story reveals that civilizations, including our own, can change catastrophically. It also suggest the dark possibility that the human project is so evanescent that it’s essentially meaningless. Most sensible adults avoid such thoughts. Instead, we invest enormous energy in our families, friends, jobs, and day-to-day activities. And we yearn to leave some enduring evidence of our brief moment on Earth, some lasting sign of our individual or collective being. So we construct a building, perhaps, or found a company, write a book, or raise a family. We seldom acknowledge this deep desire for meaning and longevity, but it’s surely one source of our endless fascination with Rome’s fall: if we could just understand Rome’s fatal weakness, maybe our societies could avoid a similar fate and preserve their accomplishments for eternity.”
Let us then consider this American-centric civilization’s accomplishments: paranoid parents who think their fat video-game playing moronic children will be raped by pudgy balding men. Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise. The American news-media. Cellophane packaged food. Chemicals with unpronounceable names. Industrialized slaughter houses for our domesticated animals, one of which (the cow) now has to be treated as potential toxic waste. Oprah Winfrey’s book club, to industrialize fiction consumption. A tourism industry. An art industry. Designers working away designing the knobs for the ends of curtain rods. Marketing agencies. Billboards. Short films conceptually contrived to promote things.
I’m just playing the USA=Western Civilization game, since, that’s the PR, the marketing, the televised ads, and the billboards have told me my whole life. England would seem to be the Mini-me side-kick, while Canada is USA’s nerdy brother, perhaps austistic, perhaps a good reader. Canada has an inferiority complex and isn’t as glamourous as the more famous brother. Canada is Napoleon Dynamite’s brother chatting up hot babes on the internet. Canada is Western Civilization’s art movie compared to the USA’s Schawrzenegger action flick.
It seems like France, Russia, Poland, Italy – they’re civilizations unto themselves and are thus somewhat divorced from the Anglo-American Empire’s sphere of influence. I’m not sure where Australia fits in since they’re more Anglo than American. Nevertheless, the United States has over 700 military bases in 130 countries in the world. Whatever we think we’re doing when we call ourselves democracies, and whatever we think of our political situation, that reality alone makes the USA Rome. And while Rome left a legacy which can still inspire sixteen hundred years after the fact, a legacy of art, architecture and law, the American Empire’s legacy so far seems to be highways and chemically processed stuff, its art made largely without archival concerns, its documents increasingly becoming subject to digital fragility.
Rome’s reputation for wickedness – brilliantly captured in I Claudius – is usually taught to us via Christian exegesis with gladiatorial reference but I think USA is well on her way to matching Rome’s record given that in July, the Internet Watch Foundation (a UK ‘child porn hotline’ site, which prefers to refer to such images as simply ‘child abuse’) reported that servers in the United States host 50% of the world’s ‘child abuse content’ while the wild-west of Russia (where your last phishing attempt may have come from) is only responsible for 15%. If we take as a measure how we treat our children as a sign of civilization, one has a rather perverse way of judging the winner of the Cold War. This rather abysmal accomplishment of American/Western Civilization – the sexualization of children (I can’t even watch anything on Jon Benet Ramsay, nevermind August’s weirdo) is something I can’t even be sarcastic about here and want to triumph as another grand accomplishment of our globalized society worth preserving.
Homer-Dixon’s thoughts can be answered: yes our society is haywire, and yes, this can only lead to a greater crisis down the road. But if we agree that current living conditions are inhumane and not worth preserving, what then is the better way? It is a moral question – that is, it calls us to envision and articulate a vision of a good life which is currently being articulated for us by Hollywood and advertising. We are not choosing to live lives with meaning or with purpose. We are choosing to fit ourselves into someone else’s image of the world, striving to buy stuff we don’t need and tempted to envy by by Robin Leach’s fucking voiceovers. This decade’s terrorist nonsense is nothing more than another example of the resources squandered by the rich and famous. Because, once again, it’s not like we don’t have enough food. So, if kids screaming at their computers while others lip-sync ‘Numa Numa’; racism and intolerance; cold-heartedness; celebrity waste and stupidity isn’t this civilization’s vision of utopia, then what is?
Is our real crime, not that we have achieved these things, but that we jumped ahead and achieved them without a sustainable framework? Would we all want SUV’s if they contributed to the health of the planet? Would we all want to be obese if there were a pill that could make us Hollywood lean overnight? (Thereby making us procrastinate about taking it, saying, ‘oh, I just don’t feel like being thin today’ while we order the super-size fries). Isn’t the real horror about some of this (excluding the child-sex abomination) based on the fact that we’re indebting our children to a life more poor than our own? Because, evidently, our economy of supplying need-and-greed has made us happy to have cluttered homes and it’s obvious that this hoarding is in part due to a fuck-the-future selfishness.
Here, I’m reminded of the German historian Götz Aly, who wrote of Hitler: ‘Hitler gained overwhelming support with his policy of running up debts and explaining that it would be others that paid the price. He promised the Germans everything and asked little of them in return. The constant talk of “a people without living space”, “international standing”, “complementary economic areas” and “Jew purging” served a single purpose: to increase German prosperity without making Germans work for it themselves. This was the driving force behind his criminal politics: not the interests of industrialists and bankers such as Flick, Krupp and Abs. Economically, the Nazi state was a snowballing system of fraud. Politically, it was a monstrous bubble of speculation, inflated by the common party members”.
This is to say that our superficial wealth today, founded on the infrastructure of non-renewable oil, means poverty for our children’s children. Governments have given up passing laws – making intentional decisions – in favor of passing tax-cuts or tax-breaks, reserving attempts at law-making for such retrogressive ends as rebutting gay marriage or trying to legitimize torture. (Which implies that they can’t imagine how to control people in those ways through tax-breaks).
People have come to equate wealth with volumes of money and not with the cultural riches which make a place worth visiting and living in and treating as an heirloom. So we’ve built ugly office towers all over the world because they’re utilitarian function is to warehouse human capital for 8 or more hours a day and left to execute their inane tasks so that the minority in control of the organization can benefit from their expertise, skill and time, to play golf all day. This means that the cultural riches of our civilization, that which we hope to leave for our children to enjoy are not the maginficant cathedrals of yesteryear, but the landscaped greens of the 18-hole golf course to be found wherever there’s room to put one (even in the deserts of Saudi Arabia). But it’s not like we don’t have enough fresh water or anything.
If the sustainability issue were to be fixed in the next 25 years so that in 2031 we could indulge in guilt free celebrity watching at the Toronto Film Fest, would we still be miserable when superficially nothing had changed? Would we then be happy with a civilization of kiddie-porn perverts, fat and stupid kids, congested highways, fear-mongering news-media, thoughtless politicians?
If this consumerist utopia would not be acceptable then, why is it acceptable now? Again, what kind of world would we like to live in? What kind of life would we like to live? Because, with reference to Homer Dixon’s ‘extraordinary crisis’ those will be the questions that will need answering. And if we can’t answer it now, when we have all time time in the world, how much more difficult will it be to answer when our cities have begun to be destroyed by storms?
Adam Curtis
It may help if we were familiar with how we got here. An excellent summary can be found in the films of Adam Curtis.
I first came across the documentaries of Adam Curtis when The Power of Nightmares was broadcast on CBC Newsworld in the spring of 2005. I soon found copies online and linked to them on Goodreads (issue 05w17:1). In the 18 months since, we’ve had Google Video show up where you can now find the Nightmares series in better quality than what was then available and where you can also find his 2002 documentary The Century of the Self.
The Century of the Self is as remarkable as Nightmares in that it traces the influence of Sigmund Freud over the course of 20th Century Western soceity through, not only his theories, but his family. I was very surprised to learn that Freud’s nephew Edmund Bernays was the fellow who invented ‘public relations’ as an alternative form of propaganda, and who is thus responsible for the past century’s advertising industry. Basically, the story told in Century of the Self is how the marketing and advertising industry grew up around the idea that we were motivated by unconscious desires which could only be placated through products. We were turned into consumers by an application of Freud’s psychoanalysis; to such and extant that by the end of the century governments were treating us as customers and politcians saw themselves as managers in the retail sector of public services. Not only that, but the whole ‘selfish-baby-boomer’ / lifestyle politics / yuppie-thing’ of the 1980s has its roots in this combination of psychology and marketing.
(It should be noted that this documentary dates from 2002, the same year when John Ralston Saul mocked this point of view in a presentation for his then recently released book On Equilibrium recorded in Toronto and later broadcast on CBC’s Ideas. I raise this to suggest that in the years since things have changed so that this type of talk can now seem a little old-fashioned (as is Saul’s thesis in his most recent book, The Collaspe of Globalism). Instead of being treated as customers with regard to public services, we now have to deal with two-bit explanations of the world’s pseudo-problems caused by conservative men trying to fit everything into their god-box).
Curtis’s narratives, while profound, are also weak in the sense that they are too simplistic: the reality of our Western society since 1950 is a complex weave and while we can analyze a thread here and there, a larger pattern is meanwhile being expressed. The plot of the 20th century as presented in Century of the Self was that people were understood to be irrational and so it was thought democracy could never work; they were thus lulled into docility by bought dreams of happiness; dreams woven by Public Relations people.
Of course, business was complicit in this conspiracy, because they’d always feared a time when industrial supply would overwhelm demand and thus lead to a failure to sell. Lifestyle marketing eliminated that worry and in the process created Individualism. (John Ralston Saul’s brilliant analysis of Individualism is to be found as Chapter 19 of Voltaire’s Bastards). Politicians, in turn, used focus-group techniques to get themselves elected and then cater to the self-interested civilians/subjects-of-lifestyle-marketing (Individuals) with the added benefit that a docile population is democratically ineffective allowing those in charge to do whatever they want.
The population of the United States in 1790 was a little less than 4 million. That of the UK at the time was a little over 16 million. And so a Continental Congress from a population of less than the Greater Toronto Area declared independence from the Parliament representing half of the current Canadian population. These numbers, in today’s context, make history seem like the story of people who had nothing else better to do. And it shows just how docile our world is given our enormous numbers. We live within a remarkable feet of social-structuring brought about by educational conditioning.
This describes what John Ralston Saul constantly refers to as a corporatist society, which is fragmented into interest-groups; where the population is obedient and docile and feels incompetent beyond their area of expertise. Democracy has become a sham because we’ve given up control over our lives so that it can be scheduled by our bosses. But if we believe life is about ‘expressing our selves’ then we can buy a fast-food version: our identities come through products which saves time thinking about anything and we can thus focus on getting our jobs done in our machine-world. We live in a time were we routinely refer to people as ‘human capital’ and expect them to behave as smoothly in a role as any other machined, interchangeable part. This basic everyday dehumanization has stripped us of a sense of dignity which leads to weak backs and slumped shoulders and thus a new market for Dr. Ho’s pillows.
Curtis’s Wikipedia page states that he is working on a new series to air later this year, called Cold Cold Heart about the ‘the death of altruism and the collapse of trust – trust in politicians, trust in institutions and trust in ourselves, both in our minds and our bodies.’ I am looking forward to seeing this, since it is this quality of distrust, mean-spirtedness, and lack of trust in our selves by which I’ll forever remember this decade with the same amount of disgust I’ve so far had only for the 1980s. This series would seem to be an extension of Part 4 of Self because it was in this episode that Curtis traced the development of consumerist politics, and showed an excerpt for Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic convention speech, followed by an interview conducted for the series where Cuomo says, (at about the 20 minute mark) ‘The worst thing Ronald Reagan did was to make the denial of compassion respectable’.
It is this quality of distrust and hard-heartedness that I’d like to better understand because our current society is nothing more than the expression of our own dehumanized inhumanity. But I’m not so caught up in Western-centrism to think there’s no alternative. The history of many civilizations teaches us that things have gotten really bad many times; each time the horrors pass and something simpler comes in its place. This is the thesis of Homer Dixon’s upcoming book. His point will be that we can control our future. We shouldn’t get caught up in dooming-and-glooming the present which doesn’t deserve to survive. I think we should instead begin brainstorming about what kind of society we’d like to live in, and then try to make it happen somehow.
The current Canadian population is about 32 million. In January, Apple Computers announced it had sold 42 million iPods around the world. This means that Apple’s infrastructure – to handle the registration requirements – is greater than that needed by the 1st world nation of Canada. It would seem to follow that if 32 million people can give themselves health-care, so could the 43 million uninsured Americans. Of course, this isn’t likely to happen, precisely due to the fractured nature of the common good brought about by the rise of Individualism.
While Individualism can be seen as having broken society, I’d like to think this is only temporary. The Individual rose up in a century dominated by dictatorships – not only political, but also cultural. The greatest art form of the 20th Century is undoubtedly the movie, which consists of a passive audience watching someone’s else’s artistic vision. At a basic level it is a dictatorial relationship. The Individual is now driving a cultural paradigm shift that makes the iPod the primary symbol of current cultural relationships – people want control over their cultural products, which is vastly different than the passive acceptance of media which existed throughout the 20th Century. The internet has empowered people away from the illusion of community and participation brought about through consumerism, and begun instead to interconnect them with other like minded people which can only in turn build bridges to new communities. Individualism now operates in such a way that someone like myself can watch these Curtis videos and feel educated and enlightened and informed, not only because MSM had originally served it to me through a scheduled broadcast, but because I downloaded it from a website, as can you. – Timothy
Today, the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan went up by four. I haven’t been keeping count so I don’t know what the total is. What I do know is that this headline pops up every second week or so and is part of the larger pattern of patriarchal conservative governments in power (who keep falling inline to the Bush Administration’s patriarchal and dim-witted view of the world). When the Liberals were in power, the Canadians were only being killed by American ‘friendly-fire’. But since the Harper government came to power we’ve seen the Canadians take on more responsibility and become the prime-movers in keeping Afghanistan from falling back to Taliban control. This decade is full of war news because conservative men are running things – be they conservative Islamic men who think the whole world should be Muslim; or conservative Western men who try to tie all this crap to ideas about the glory of war, and ‘right wars’ against ‘evil’ people.Personally, I think the Taliban are shits so I don’t mind the Canadian mission. I am not taking Jack Layton’s recent suggestion to withdraw and negotiate for peace with Taiban seriously. I am a little annoyed with the fact that the awfulness of the Taliban is being obscured in favour of Canadian navel-gazing ( a selfishness which makes headlines of soldiers deaths with no real analysis of what they’re doing in the first place). To say that we’re stooges for half-assed American imperial ambitions is too simple. To say that Canadian soldiers are occasionally being killed because we have a Conservative government in office is also simplistic but somewhat accurate. But I don’t think as a nation we’re all together too simple-minded to agree that keeping the Taliban from returning to power is a worthy thing.
In the months before September 11 2001 (five years ago in the past) the Taliban’s control over Afghanistan was beginning to make headlines in North America. This is the group that executed women on soccer fields, made it illegal to not have a beard, and blew up ancient Buddhist statues as representations of idol worship. It is not an exaggeration to call such behaviors barbaric. Meanwhile, the American government was overlooking such (dare I call them atrocities?) policies because Taliban barbarity was keeping poppies from being grown, and as a reward for their part in the glorious War on Drugs, were receiving significant funding and support. (Ok, maybe not ‘significant’ funding – I’m fuzzy on the details, but I’m working with what was being said five years ago).
All this changed that Tuesday in September. By the late afternoon of the 11th, there was a statement by the leader of the Taliban making the broadcast rounds saying they had nothing to do with the day’s events. Which of course was untrue, as they’d sheltered Bin Laden (who at first too denied responsibility). When the United States attacked the Taliban in October, the reasons were clear and understandable. Overthrowing a barbaric regime was a good thing to do. Chasing after Bin Laden was justified. Men, ‘liberated’ (how that word has been cheapened since) were able to go the barber’s and get a shave for the first time in years.
(I occasionally grow beards and last did so this summer. I shaved it off three weeks ago and this example will always make me thankful that I at least have the option, unlike the men living under the Taliban regime).
Circa 2003 the Americans had destroyed the Taliban. There were accusations of massacres, (which for war is unfortunately normal). There was the fact that they shipped off a lot of these captured men to Gitmo and that some of them were innocent and that some of them were children; all of which will hopefully get sorted out and corrected one day. The Taliban was gone and the civilians of Afghanistan could begin to rebuild civilization under the security provided by outside forces.
Three years later, the Americans have abandoned Afghanistan to the Canadians to devote themselves to securing the Iraqi oil infrastructure so that more obese Americans can scoot around in SUVs using relatively cheap gasoline. (Because ‘America is addicted to oil’ – President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2006). Osama Bin Laden, on the run in Afghanistan, was able to get away because the Bush family had unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. This has meant that the Taliban have been able to rebuild their forces and are trying to return to power, killing Canadians in the process. But, unlike Jack Layton (proving why the NDP are largely irrelevant) I don’t think we should negotiate for peace with them and bring the soldiers home so that we’ll have more on hand for the next Toronto snow storm. Let them do their jobs helping to secure a landscape that hasn’t been at peace in decades. One day they’ll be able to return, but hopefully that will be long after the Taliban have ceaased to be relevant.
If The One had been solely a CBC production, one suspects that would have charged ahead to do what they could to promote the career of George Stroumboulopoulos, but thankfully sense kicked in at ABC and it has been cancelled. When I read this welcome news in last week’s paper, I noticed that it ended on the usual, ‘CBC is searching for a vision in the age of the internet’. To find this vision, it would help if CBC had a sense of its history, and a sense of traveling around the country without satellite hookups for broadband reporting.The idea behind The One it was reported, was to raise Stroumboulopoulos’ profile so that cable-less rubes would not be shocked when The Hour debuts on the main network in the fall, following The National. Why this type of thing is required, I don’t know. I do know that The Hour is already unwatchable due to it’s too cool for school attitude. I don’t need to know anything happening in the world badly enough to have it portioned out in bullet point cool to learn about it. I do know that CBC used to have great shows that treated young people as intelligent (Big Life, CounterSpin) but undoubtedly these were repeatedly cancelled due to low ratings. Why the CBC needs to chase ratings is a good question.
1. A Public Broadcaster
The public should demand greater funding for the CBC so that it doesn’t have to chase ratings and so that it can feel free to broadcast esoteric programing of limited appeal. This itself is a very old idea, so why are we still talking about it? Why hasn’t this happened yet?
But given enough resources, to match the ideal the CBC needs to recognize that there are 24 hours in a day and this is the time of VCRs and TIVO. There should be plenty of room on the schedule for all sorts of weird stuff that broaden our perspective and who cares if some it will be on at 4am? Young people know how to set VCRs. Something as wild as the gay-fisting show might have a place on the channel. It would be offensive to some (hell, to many), but shouldn’t public broadcasting aim to smooth out our preconceived notions by helping us become well-rounded? Shouldn’t contemporary sophisticated people at least understand what such a thing as gay-fisting is, even if it’s not their cup of tea? There should be no room for ‘I don’t know’ in today’s world. CBC, help us broaden our minds, not limit them by giving us what we think we want!
2. From Coast to Coast
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was developed to provide a coast to coast radio network in the 1930s, when this was a new technology whose benefit and advantage was obvious. But what kind of broadcasting is of interest to 20 year olds? Wi-Fi. CBC used to have a station of antennae and powerful broadcast equipment in New Brunswick which put out the network’s short-range radio signal. This station was shut down during the 1990s after the internet made it obsolete. If they thought that was worthy of investment why not Wi Fi as well? Take a laptop or a Blackberry to the rural corners of the country and you’ll be lucky to find a signal. My recent experience traveling through the East Coast on summer holiday brought this to mind – I did find signals but they were weak and didn’t really work that well. But it seems to me that if the people from the 1930s were still around, they’d be arguing for a network of wi-fi towers that stretch from sea to sea. This would also have the benefit of bringing broadband internet access to the rural communities along the US border and further an international image of being considerate.
What we are seeing, in Toronto at any rate, is the Ontario Power Commission taking up this challenge. The electric company. Ok, fine. Let’s not be limited to the idea that the official broadcasting corporation should be limited to only broadcasting, or that the power company should be limited to supplying electricity. In Toronto’s case, the wi-fi connectivity is coming as a side-effect of the new power meters, which will broadcast their information using this network. So this is an added benefit. But Toronto is not Canada, and Toronto already has the infrastructure to support widely available broadband internet access. My point is that the rest of the country does not, and the CBC is uniquely mandated to take this up if they so chose.
As it is, the CBC is stuck in the old media models, of television and radio, while treating the internet and such connectivity as an afterthought. I for one don’t understand why their radio programs, which are free to listen to when broadcast through the air, become commodities to be bought, sold, controlled afterward, so that programs like Ideas get a ‘best of’ treatment for the podcast, dolled out on a week to week basis. The CBC archive should be openly available to download. Haven’t we already paid of this content through inadequate allocation of public funds and the patience to sit through McCain food ads?
As it is, what is available on the CBC Archive webpage has been edited – selected and packaged and available only if you use Windows Player, eliminating many Mac users who probably make up the right audience for such content – cultural workers who could really use this content. This web-page was set up in 2003, reflects a corporate relationship with Microsoft which is counter to the public-good (they should be taking advantage of open-source software), and is now obsolete in light of YouTube and Google Video’s use (and thus, standardization) of Flash video, which can be played on anything.
3. Rights
It’s come up before that the CBC cannot treat its archives the way most of us would like because of the contracts signed with the performers etc, entitling them to fees for re-broadcasting, fees which the CBC cannot afford. This is an intolerable situation and something needs to be done about this.
4. Vision
In short my vision for the CBC is the following: as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they should invest in contemporary broadcasting of wi-fi so that internet connectivity from sea to sea is possible. As a public institution, it makes more sense for us to collectively pool our resources (through the usual proper funding allocation derived from tax revenue) so that individuals aren’t burdened with the costs of bringing satellite internet hookups to the lake-shore cottages of the country. As a public broadcaster, they should feel free to program a wide variety of material that reflects the interests and cultures of this country: enough of the white-bread mainstream hockey Shania Twain specials. Where does the CBC reflect the Indo-Canadian perspective? How does the CBC reflect the Aboriginal perspective? With 24 hours in a day, there’s room for 24 different one-hour shows, or 48 different half-hour shows. Further, with the internet, available through their coast-to-coast wi-fi network, they could have internet-only programs. The CBC should have one of the richest server farms in the country, loaded up with their digitized archives, so that fifty years of broadcast history is available to historians and curious citizens. In the Age of the Internet, there should be no excuse for ignorance and none for lack of historical perspective. Such conditions exist today because for too long information has been controlled by editorial shaping, itself not a bad thing (in light of criticisms of Wikipedia) but one where bias can’t often be easily unmasked.
The CBC of the 21st Century should reflect the interests of a well-rounded, highly learned population. George Stroumboulopoulos is in the unfortunate position of being the poster boy for the CBC’s own sense of cultural inadequacy, a sense that can only exist by treating the Canadian public as only being interested in superficiality, rather than acknowledging their appetite for things which help them grow as individuals and further an in-depth understanding of what’s happening in the world.
Finally, to end on a positive note:
5. CBC Radio 3
Is a success on all these counts. Radio show, podcast, esoteric programming, the hint that the host is familiar with such subversive things as drug use and gay erotica (that is, he need not be gay to be cool with its existence), CBC3 shows that CBC knows how to do this. It need not be constrained by limited thinking or a need to broadly appeal to hockey fans. More programing like CBC3 would help the corporation become the 21st Century institution it is destined to be.
Interestingly, one of the oldest guidelines for sales and marketing in any medium is to sell the benefits, not the features, so we shouldn’t really have to harp on this here. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it. Of course, the more bad writing you push on your users, the more you train them to disregard your message in general. Useless content doesn’t just annoy people; it’s a leading cause of lost sales. (source)
Yesterday I lived in a pre-millennial dream of the future. I spent the day going over my pictures and other files on a computer far more advanced than was available in the 1990s. I watched a video clip on YouTube and downloaded one to my hardrive. A delivery in the afternoon dropped off the municipality’s new compost bins. Unpacking this revealed numerous reading materials and a DVD to watch. I placed one of the enclosed biodegradable plastic bags in the new kitchen bin and threw away my first plum pit.
Later I went to the grocery store to get some things (like soy-based coffee cream, since this morning I used my father’s lactose free skim milk) so off I went to the grocery store, where I got the stuff ???? new coffee filters (unbleached ‘organic’), Jiff crunchy peanut butter, some canola oil, and the Silk soy-cream. The 1-8 items lane was closed so I went through the self-checkout. Punch the buttons on the screen, scan the items, swipe the card and key in your personal code. It’s as if I’m writing for a futurist design magazine in 1987 as I type this now. Then it’s home, and TV watching ???? Simon Schama’s History of Britain episode 2: ‘Conquest’ which I borrowed from the library.
Afterward, going around the channels, I came across the Frontline episode from earlier this year on the Iraqi insurgency, and so was thrust into the middle of this early 21st Century war and political reality. This was obviously re-broadcast due to the assassination of al-Zarqawi last Wednesday. After this, I found CBC’s The National that had a story on the Supreme Court hearing a case about these security certificates; this story was followed by a mournful press conference featuring the two men in England who were mistakenly arrested on suspicion that they were building a chemical weapon. Both men had shaven heads and long beards. All of this drove home the fact that our time is strangely polarized between Muslims and whatever the fuck the rest of us are.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Ottawa was Michael Ignatieff. Earlier in the day I saw him awkwardly read from a speech in the House of Commons, and with his academic background, the speech was well researched and well argued. Although, as an MP he lacked the charisma he’s shown at other podiums, where’s he’s prone to break up his points by telling us what he’s told us (‘I’ve mentioned this … and that…’). He was arguing against Bill C-10, an act to implement mandatory minimum sentences. He was answered by the Conservative MP from Peterborough, who quoted Julian Fantino’s blustering about ‘hug-a-thug’ policies, making this MP look like little more than a hot-head. His over-sized body also made an impression of being a somewhat stupid bovine. The Hansard doesn’t register the change in tone of this MP’s voice, which put quotes around ‘hug-a-thug’ and ‘paradigm’ the later as if to mock Ignatieff’s inteligence and background.
Ignatieff responded as one does when one is tired of stupidity, and went over his points, saying that the Liberal policies during the 1990s did not contribute to a ‘hug-a-thug’ mentality, but that the stats clearly show a reduction in crime overall during this period. Afterward, an MP from Quebec, a Bloc Quebecois, complimented the speech in the way that one does when one is impressed and trying to encourage someone who’s been unfairly attacked by a bully, showing sympathy and mentioning how well researched it was, directing a question to Ignatieff about it all.
I was very impressed myself and dearly hope he becomes Prime Minister ???? because here was an example of a intelligent voice ‘raising the level of debate’. The MP from Peterborough suddenly seemed so old fashioned, a symptom of the raucous, dysfunctional, and stupid Parliments that have produced little to be proud of and a lot to be bored and unimpressed by. Ignatieff bringing brains to Parliament was another way in which I felt yesterday to be living in the 21st Century.
Later in the day, the house voted on wether to send C-10 to second reading. Ignatieff and M???nard (the BQ MP) voted against it, but it nevertheless carried at 157-116.
Wednesday 12 June 1996. Now the day before, with the landlord shit, I made a call for an appointment with our landlord Mr. S. So I got up at 12.30, and at 1.10 was out the door, to Duke St, where I got some money and then caught a bus to go to Fairview. The appointment was at 2pm, but at 2 I was at the mall, and since I would be a half-hour late, I called and rescheduled for the next day. So I took the number 1 bus back, getting off at Oxford, to go to the Kings College Library. What a beautiful place! I’m not really one for architecture, but that place was awesome. There, I borrowed Michelangelo’s poems, and then walked home. To class and I did a weekly brief, but it couldn’t print, and I tried and tried and gave up. After class, home with music and Michelangelo’s poems and candlelight to save power. This was a bad day, overcast, me tired, and I concluded that day with the thought that I should never have even gotten up. It was one of those days.
That night I dreamt I was in junior high school again, in Grade 7, and we had these projects we had been working on. There was a boy, we called him Artaud, and he was a silent, moody fellow, anti-social and unknown. Actually I found out a little later that Artaud was a girl, a cute one to. The day came to present her report. I was given a stop watch, to time it. I pressed the start button and dropped it to the floor. Artaud didn’t say a word – more moodiness I thought instantly, but immidately someone jumped onto her chair and applauded enthusiastically. And then I got it, and I too jumped on my chair with screams of bravo! The moodiness – it had all been a grand performance art peice, and that had been her project. Her statement was that ‘alone you are more with people than you are when you’re social,’ as was exemplified in that, after me, the whole class got it and we all cheered her and supported her. Alone she was supported. Had she been part of the crowd, she would have not been supported. Like pegs in a peg board, if one falls, the others still carry the burden and cannot help her, but alone, she is supported by the plank underneath.
So afterwards we were in the cafeteria her and I, and we talked. She was now enormously cute to me, and she had gorgeous jet black hair, straight, falling past her shoulders, and it had a silky sheen. I was facinated by her, by the genius of her project, and she was facinated also by me, saying I was intelligent and very creative. We spoke French to each other at one point. But alas , as it always happens, I woke up, her face imprinted on my mind. I also dreamt of J. that night, but I always do anyway so I don’t remember details.
~
Ten years ago I sat in a dark room, reading my Michelangelo poems after class. I was alone, I put the radio on, and listened to CBC. Did I strum the guitar? Probably, trying to learn the chord positions. Was the chair a rocking chair? For some reason I think so, but then, what happened to it, and where did it come from?Ten years later it’s a day spent with the canvases that were then unpainted, a day spent with a new digital camera that I hadn’t yet heard of, snapping pictures to download and process using the techniques I learned in art school, which I would be beginning in three months. But that night I did not know any of this, and I was sad, so I wrote: ‘This was a bad day, overcast, me tired, and I concluded that day with the thought that I should never have even gotten up. It was one of those days.’I did not yet know how the memory of that afternoon’s walk would stay with me, and how by the end of the year I would return to the grounds of Kings College to take photographs of the old trees and the fa????ade of the library, which I’d been too and had appreciated. I did not know that in ten years I would glimpse one of those photographs and be reminded that I had gone back in November, having found out about it in June.Nor did I know how the memory of that afternoon’s walk would become my mental-visual marker defining the year, the leaves glistening as they were with late afternoon sunlight breaking through the otherwise gray sky of the day – this shininess signaling for me a new turn of events in my life and it the decade – it was all there, the misery of the early half of the 1990s, and the brilliance of the later part.
What follows is my 2001 correspondence with W. Warren Wagar, who died in November 2004, and whose book, A Short History of the Future provided me with much food for thought during the period I was reading it. (And anyone who knows me might remember how I went on about it during 2000-2001).
———–
1.From: Timothy Comeau
To: W. Warren Wagar
Date: Apr 10 2001 – 9:40pm
Subject: A Short History of the Future questions
Dear Mister Wagar,I’m aware that you follow and contribute to the WSN forum, but since this mostly involves questions about your book, I wanted to write to you directly.
I am an artist in Toronto who first read your book, A Short History of the Future last summer and have found it both endlessly facinating and very entertaining. I am outside of the academies now, and have conducted a sort of independent study of the text in my spare time. Understandably, you can imagine that I find the passages dealing with art in the future to be of particular interest. I’m wondering if you could answer some questions I have.
SUBSTANIALISM
Lately, I have been most intrigued with the substantialist art of the Commonwealth. On the weekend it occured to me that what you describe as substantialism is a form of renewed humanism, (you do mention “integral humanism” but this seems to be more of a political thing than spiritual) a belief of man’s purpose arising from the scientific discoveries of cosmology and genetics. I am beginning to see what you describe as neorealist art celebrating the common person in terms of what occurred in the late Middle Ages, when medivael art achieved a new realism and incorporated a sense of the divine with that of the human – and which we call the Renaissance. (The Renaissance being a rebirth of ancient learning, but isn’t our own time in the midsts of a new re-birth, with our archaeological discoveries re-infusing our culture with knowledge of Lascaux and Chauvet?)
In attempting to describe what a “social realist” substantialist painting might look like to a friend, I pointed out the work of the BC artist Chris Woods (-albeit his paintings explore consumerism). Are you familiar with his work? (They can be viewed here: http://www.dianefarrisgallery.com/artist/woods/ )
ART IN 2200
In the autonomous society, where critics lament fossil art and that artists reject most of post modernism and modernism in favor of “simpler” forms: I have interpreted this to be conducive to the democratic infusion that the Commonwealth gave humanity, in line with the Preamble. Are medieval and folk art practiced because it is of the people? I have interpreted the rejection of pomo and mod based upon their consumerist and capitialist aspects, which I guess would vanish in the Catastrophe right?
As an artist, I am too often surrounded by the proverbial Philistines that I find anyone outside of the art discipline who talks about it as intelligently as you do to be a fellow conspirator – and I’m curious as to what your tastes are with regard to contemporary art, and what your background is with regard to its study. My own experience with professors in university was that they didn’t like to answer such questions, but as an historian of world politics, I am curious about how you see art intersecting the world system.
So, I’m wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on these ideas.
Finally, I just wanted to express how much I like the book. I especially like the format of incorporating letters and diary entries to flesh out the historical narrative. Eduardo Mistral Ortiz’s Diary entry is one of my favorites.
Thanks for your time,
Timothy Comeau
———–
2.From: W. Warren Wagar
To: Timothy Comeau
Date: Apr 11 2001 – 6:47pm
Re: A Short History of the Future questions
Dear Timothy Comeau,
Many thanks for your e-mail of yesterday. I’m glad that you found my book
of interest, but almost embarrassed that its few slender passages on the
arts could mean something to a working artist. By trade I am an
intellectual and cultural historian, so I know a little about a lot, but my
speculations about the arts of the future are based more on brave ignorance
than any sort of knowledge in depth. In my own personal life, the only art
form I know well is classical music, mostly of the period since 1880. My
comments follow.
At 09:40 PM 4/10/01 -0400, you wrote:
> Dear Mister Wagar, I’m aware that you follow and contribute to the
>WSN forum, but since this mostly involves questions about your book, I
>wanted to write to you directly. I am an artist in Toronto who first read
> your book, A Short History of the Future last summer and have found it
>both endlessly fascinating and very entertaining. I am outside of the
>academies now, and have conducted a sort of independent study of the text
>in my spare time. Understandably, you can imagine that I find the passages
>dealing with art in the future to be of particular interest. I’m wondering
>if you could answer some questions I have. SUBSTANIALISM a belief of
>man’s purpose arising from the scientific discoveries of cosmology and
>genetics. I am beginning to see what you describe as neorealist art
>celebrating the common person in terms of what occurred in the late Middle
>Ages, when medieval art achieved a new realism and incorporated a sense of
>the divine with that of the human – and which we call the Renaissance.
>(The Renaissance being a rebirth of ancient learning, but isn’t our own
>time in the midsts of a new re-birth, with our archaeological discoveries
>re-infusing our culture with knowledge of Lascaux and Chauvet?) In
>attempting to describe what a “social realist” substantialist painting
>might look like to a friend, I pointed out the work of the BC artist Chris
>Woods (-albeit his paintings explore consumerism). Are you familiar with
>his work? (They can be viewed here:
>http://www.dianefarrisgallery.com/artist/woods/) ART IN 2200
>practiced because it is of the people? I have interpreted the rejection of
>pomo and mod based upon their consumerist and capitialist aspects, which I
>guess would vanish in the Catastrophe right?
“Substantialism” is my version of the dialectical materialism of Marx &
Engels as revised by the French Marxist Jean Jaures. It argues that the
evolution of human consciousness has brought with it a new dimension of
being–“trans-being”–capable of repealing the laws of pre-human nature and
constructing a higher order of substance, a conscious, willing substance
that can make and re-make itself. The problem with modernism and pomo
alike is that they not only succumb to capitalist consumerism but also
erect an artificial barrier between the artist and his/her society. Art
becomes something produced only for other artists, a cop-out whereby
humankind at large is deliberately left in the dust. The reproduction of
this art takes full advantage of the mechanisms of the market-place,
simultaneously mocking and exploiting the hapless consumer, who is
simultaneously angered and humiliated by its seeming unintelligibility.
By contrast, art under the Commonwealth would become democratized and
would celebrate what all of us have in common. This happened, before, in
the art movements of the second half of the 19th Century, with the realism
of Courbet and the impressionism of Manet and all their followers; even
the post-impressionists (Van Gogh, Gauguin) eventually found a broad public
able to connect with their sensibility. All of this work is an art of
common humanity. The form that it would take a century from now is of
course unguessable.
world politics, I am
>curious about how you see art intersecting the world system. So, I’m
>wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on these ideas.
Several lines of your letter seem to be missing here. I would just add
that in the “House of Earth,” I anticipate the arts taking on a greater
variety of forms and media of expression, in keeping with the greater
variety, freedom, and complexity of life in such a heterodox culture. But
again, the arts would grow out of communal life, not a standardized
metropolinized “one size fits all” life.
Somewhere I think you also asked me about my own preferences. I feel the
strongest connection to the art of the second half of the 19th Century and
the first half of the 20th, through Picasso and Magritte. My musical
tastes are even narrower, essentially the music of the post-Wagnerian
generation, circa 1880-1920. My favorite composers are Gustav Mahler and
the little-known English composer Frederick Delius. Does any of this “make
sense”? You tell me!
Cheers,
Warren Wagar
———–
3.From: Timothy Comeau
To: W. Warren Wagar
Subject: Thank you for answering
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 22:48:11 -0400
Thank you for responding. You have given me a lot more to think about!
My own take on art history is whereas academic history is a narrative of recorded events, art history offers a record the psychology of the times. I sometimes define an artist as a “psychological historian”. That’s why I appreciate your inclusion of “a short art history of the future”. It’s one thing to be taught that World War I was the first industrial, mechanized war, it’s other to be taught that due to the medical advances of the time, people were surviving injuries that would have previously killed them, which was greatly shocking to the people of the day, to see the maimed “living monsters” as they thought of them, and this in turn is represented in German expressionism of the 20s(Grosz, Beckman).(I realize that’s somewhat simplistic, but I think it illustrates quite well what I am talking about – and it’s how I understand the nihilism of Leroy du Rien).
As it is, I have so far only had a vague working knowledge of Courbet and the 19th Century, but now I’m much more interested. From “the catching up,” I’ve done over the past few days, I can see what you wrote about with greater clarity. It does make a lot of sense.
I admit that my preferences lie more toward what is being done now, the contemporary art of today’s galleries and prizes. But I fully agree with your statements in your letter, art being something produced for other artists (and hence my interest in it – your point exactly) a cop-out
leaving humankind behind. My own take on this is a result of what you call “credicide” in the book.
But it’s also true that art is in a double bind. It seeks to criticize the contemporary, while being entrenched with the consumerist system. It is constantly bitting the hand that feeds it. Art exists in opposition to popular culture -as it has now for almost 150 years. As as admirer of
classical music, you see exactly what I’m talking about when trying to find the few radio stations that play it in the midst of all the other Top 40 stuff. But most people don’t appreciate classical music because for a variety of reasons they don’t invest the time to appreciate it, preffering the quick pop medleys to provide a soundtrack to their lives. Classical musicians make no apologies for not “dumbing down,” and neither do contemporary artists.
I have often thought however, that some of today’s contemporary art is comparable to that of the post impressionists: that they too will “eventually [find] a broad public”. But your book gave me a new way of looking at it all, with contemporary art’s connection to consumerism and capitalism that is by no means a guaranteed economic system. So I thank you for that.
Timothy Comeau
———–
4.From: W. Warren Wagar
To: Timothy Comeau
Subject: Re: Thank you for answering
And thanks for your further comments. I know what you mean about
how contemporary art and music takes time to reach a broader public. In a
sense that’s the whole story of the last two centuries, ever since the
invention of the “avant-garde.” Certainly some of the work done in the
last 50 years or so will eventually find an audience outside the ranks of
its initiates, but it would be a mistake to rely too heavily on the
patterns of the past. Abstract expressionism, for example, still comes
across as more curious than expressive. Dada is still a vast joke,
although widely emulated by the contemporary avant-garde. And the serial
music of the 1940s to 1960s, so universally acclaimed by the music
professors of the period, still falls on deaf ears. Yet without a vibrant
living art, culture can petrify and survive only as museum pieces fit only
for reverence. Wags like to refer to the Met in Lincoln Center as the
Metropolitan Museum of Opera, a showcase for Handel, Mozart, Rossini,
Wagner, and Verdi, staged over and over again. The same goes for all past
great work. No wonder so much of postmodernism consists of quotation. As
someone says in A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, “all late culture is
quotation.” What a terrifying thought! (And now, lord help me, I’m
quoting myself.)But much of the blame falls on the academy, I am convinced. Just
as science and technology have become more and more minutely specialized
and professionalized, so the arts have been captured, catalogued,
classified, critiqued, and endlessly subdivided by the academicians. I
was on a doctoral committee recently for a novelist. He got his Ph.D.
with a science-fiction novel. And his partner was getting a Ph.D. for
critiquing gay poetry. Professors tell you whether you’re any good. Even
the writing of history (my field) has lost most of its grace and force
thanks to submission to the canons of professionalism. I have been a
professional academic for 43 years now, and sometimes I feel like a Greek
slave teaching Aristotle to a Roman patrician or a mandarin in the
neo-Confucian court of a Chinese emperor. Of course my “credentials” also
gave me the freedom to write A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, so perhaps I
shouldn’t complain.
Enough rambling. Best wishes!
———–
Shortly after this correspondence I went out and bought Phaidon’s book on Courbet and read it within a month, furthering my understanding not only of Realism, but leading to the work of Baudelaire as well. Two years before I had borrowed this book from the NSCAD library, but it didn’t hold my interest at the time.
From: steven.laurie
To: timothy c.
Date: May 30, 2006 7:18 PM
Subject: Re: Article
Timothy
I read the article about my work or press release. I found it interesting. I
can see what you are getting at but I have no interest in mocking the subject
matter i am dealing with. Also I agree that masculinity or “manliness” is not
entirely a performance.
Thanks for your comments though. I appreciate the time you took. I would like
to hear more of what you think on this issue.
Psychopaths
In today’s Globe and Mail, ‘Focus’ section, there’s an article called ‘The Psychopath in the Corner Office’ about everyday psychopathic people who rise to positions of power. Mostly because the way the business world is, their ruthlessness is rewarded. These types of articles on ‘everyday psychopaths’ pop up every year or so. This stat:
In Prof. Hare’s estimation, the average incidence of psychopathy in North America is 1% of the population. That would mean there are about 300,000 psychopaths in Canada – and close to 3000 reading this very newspaper today. Perhaps you know one. Or are one.
One percent of the population begins to suggest that this is a normal variety of mind, a way they once characterized autism in a previous article from about two or three years ago.
This article on autism began by suggesting that the autistic mind was a result of natural selection – part of the variety of human being. Which is a decent way of thinking about it. ‘Psychopathy,’ writes the article’s author, Alexandra Gill,’…is a personality disorder characterized by a deep lack of conscience, empathy and compassion’.
With my empathy toward psychopaths activated, I wrote this letter to the editor:
From: Timothy Comeau
To: Letters@globeandmail.com
Date: May 27, 2006 4:45 PM
Subject: re: psychopath articleI read the article on corporate (and other) psychopaths with interest but grew concerned as to the validity of intensive background checks to prevent psychopaths from reaching positions to wreak havoc. Wouldn’t extensive screening lead to making these people unemployable and thereby reducing them to a life of welfare and poverty, where they’d become embittered and even more dangerous? As psychopaths are characterized by a deep lack of empathy and compassion, they’d be victimized by our own lack of empathy and compassion toward them. As the article suggests, our society is too geared toward the appreciation of ruthlessness that it comes as no surprise that so many seem to be high up in the food chain, and perhaps are already occupying their proper social roles.
You once ran an article on autism in which it was suggested that the autistic mind is the result of natural selection – producing variety amongst us. A similar suggestion about the psychopathic mind would have been warranted. But it’s funny that we treat autistics so poorly compared to psychopaths, especially considering that the autistics of the past are probably responsible for so many of our great endeavors while the psychopaths have given us our worst.
Timothy Comeau
As I re-read that now, I see that I should have also added that the way we continue to treat the poor is evidence of our own psychopathic society.
Manliness I
There was another article in today’s paper that I appreciated, about home-grown initiation rites. Also found in the ‘Focus’ section, and titled, ‘Saying goodbye to childhood’, it was about a young chap (Scott) who turned 16 and had an unusual birthday party.
Scott’s parents had organized an unofficial rite of passage to initiate their son into manhood. They invited a group of male friends and relatives they respected to talk to their son about what it means to become a man.
Scott’s mother goes on to say that she wanted something more than the usual ways we ‘self-initiate’.
Those who have studied life transitions agree that rites of passage are important – even essential – for adolescents becoming adults. ‘It doesn’t matter what we call it […] if adults don’t respond, adolescents will initiate themselves, often [but] not always, in destructive ways’. Binge drinking, experimenting with drugs or having sex are some of the ways teens in our society self-initiate.
It’s funny that needs saying, as if written for pre-adolescents, ignoring that everyone else not in question has gone through being a teenager, and should be able to remember how important it was to get laid or drunk for the first time.
The fellow quoted above is Ron Grimes, who wrote a book called Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage and goes on to say therein that ‘whatever the reason, the past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the construction of rites of passage’. For Scott, this group of men numbered about twelve: a couple of neighbors, the fathers of some of his friends, is gay uncle with his partner. ‘Few of them knew each other, yet they were asked to share some personal experiences and insights into what it means to be a man’.
‘I wanted him to come away with the idea that being a man is honouring all aspects of his person; the physical, the mental, the spiritual and the emotional,’ [Scott’s father] says.He adds that he didn’t really learn how to live his life as a man until he was about 40 years old and attended a men’s-only weekend workshop in Berkeley, Calif. ‘It was like an initiation. It helped me realize what I missed out on … In my family, there wasn’t much talk about being a man. There wasn’t much discussion about my life beyond school’.
As for what the men told Scott…
the men talked about the necessity of doing the right thing, as hard as that may be, staying true to yourself and not following the crowd, finding something important outside of yourself and contributing to it. And when it comes to sex, being in a committed relationship is better than casual sex.
As Scott’s Mom says, she couldn’t pay someone to say such things. She saw that the following day he had a spring in his step and a pride in himself.
According to [Scott’s mom] society as a whole suffers from young adults being, as she calls it ‘uninitiated’. ‘Lots of teens don’t want to become men or women. We all known of 50 year old ‘boys’ who never said goodbye to their childhood because they weren’t shepherded,’ she says.A new books suggests that she might be on to something. In researching The Boomerang Age: Transitions to Adulthood in Families Simon Fraser University sociologist Barbara Mitchell interviewed 2000 adults from 19 to 35 years old in the greater Vancouver area who had either left home and come back, or never left at all. The majority said their were in their parent’s homes for economic reasons, but about 25% of them (mainly young men) said they were still at home because they weren’t psychologically or emotionally ready to leave.
A lot of the so-called artists I know/knew don’t want to be men or women either.
Manliness II
There appears to be something in the air though, since I’ve noticed attitudes toward manliness are up for discussion. The rise of ‘metrosexuality’ a couple of years ago caused a lot of talk and about 15 years ago there was a lot of talk too about these types of men-only circles (like what Scott’s dad must have gone too) where’d they go out to the woods and howl.
As a young man, trying to find my way without the benefit of young Scott’s experience, and dissatisfied with the initiations I did go through of the usual binge drinking and virginity-loss, I find that I’m also both intrigued and bothered by how the popular ideas about being a man are simply degrading. Why is it, for example, that fast food restaurants try to sell hamburgers by appealing to a fucked-up sense of manliness?
There used to be Harvey’s commercials that did this, and currently there’s a Burger King commercial I’ve seen, with a bunch of men walking tall and proud because they got their meat sandwich. Further, there are those Bud Light commercials advertising a coupon for steaks. WTF?
Recently, a book was published by Harvey Mansfield called Manliness (and this is what comes up when you Google that term as the first result, in addition to its reviews). All the reviews point out Mansfield’s harping against feminists and how, as Mark Kingwell said in his Globe and Mail review some time ago (March 18th, from which I paraphrase), ‘how it manages to offend all sorts of people at once’.
It’s almost to begin to imply that being a man today, or claiming to be one, is to be offensive. Which brings up Aristotle, who’s merely offensive because he’s a Greek Philosopher. That is, Artistotle is a dead white male, a pejorative phrase which Wikipedia tells us:
is a rhetorical device used to deride the emphasis on Western civilization in schools […]. The term was used pejoratively in the early 1990s by those advocating multicultural studies. The term finds widespread usage among members of the educational establishment who see students as agents of social change.
Why is that, to expand our minds and our study to something beyond our immediate context (such as Western Civilization and its heritage) we have to first insult it, or imply that it is offensive?
Nevertheless, it was in Kingwell’s review that I was alerted to Artistotle’s list of manly attributes, found in his Niomachean Ethics.
Ethics are the application of morality, and morality we should consider not as something religious or superstitious but as simply the collection of ideas we have about living a good life. For some, enjoying a cup of tea before bed time is part of a good life, and thus is a moral action, and it thus follows that not buying tea is unethical. For many, enjoying a pint on a patio with friends is a part of a good life, and therefore it would be unethical to shut down all the bars or to quit drinking. Because I’m deeply interested in the variety of moral worlds that you find once you get past the idea that morality has something to do with Jesus (in that sense, it merely represents The Bible’s idea about what a good life is because it’s God’s idea about how we should live our lives), I’m interested in how Artistotle formulated his ideas about what a good Greek life was for a man 2300 years ago.
By Googling for it, I did come across this article earlier this week, written by an apparently young fellow in the States named Jason Roberts who’s dividing time between college and the military according to the posted profile. One almost suspects by this fellow’s way of writing and infatuation with the Classical past (in addition to a seemingly thinly-veiled misogyny) that he hasn’t yet been initiated the traditional way into manliness through sex.
However, he presents Aristotle’s thoughts on being a man through a blockquote from The Niomachean Ethics which we can break down like this –
A man, according to Aristotle, is one who is:
confident in the face of danger
moderate in his use and enjoyment of opulent things
magnanimous in estimation of his own worth
ambitious in his desire of honor
patient in response and dealings with his passions
truthful in his life and dealings with others
righteously indignant when done wrong
and just towards himself and others.
He paints a beautiful portrait of this person, saying that this man:
“????does not take petty risks
nor does he court danger
because there are few things that he values highly
but he takes great risks
and when he faces danger he is unsparing of his life
because to him there are some circumstances in which it is not worth living
he is bound to????speak and act straightforwardly????and
he cannot bear to live in dependence upon somebody else
he does not nurse resentment
In troubles that are unavoidable or of minor importance he is the last person to complain or ask for help
his gait is measured, his voice deep, his speech unhurried.????
Mr. Roberts then writes (interspersed with my italicized comments delimitated by ‘//’):
But today, every single element of manliness that Aristotle described is under attack. The 1960’s ushered in the era of the Feminists. Unlike intellectual trends, feminism became a cultural trend. But not only was their view of womanliness skewed, their view of manliness was also dangerously wrong. Sadly, this view has come to dominate our culture, beit in the form of the metrosexual, the effeminate man, or the man in touch with his feminine side.
// I consider myself to have a healthy dose of metrosexuality, so that I at least have a fashion sense, unlike the fellows you see in the fast-food stereotypes.
Instead of a man who is courageous and confident in facing reality, men are now told that it is okay to be soft and cowardly.
// Agree
Instead of a man who is moderate, men are now told to indulge themselves in the luxuries of life; to spend huge sums on fashionable clothes, stylish haircuts, and manicures.
// I also agree this isn’t admirable
Instead of a man who is magnanimous, men are now told to be pusillanimous; to apologize for their greatness and expound upon their defects.
// ‘pusillanimous’ is defined as: ‘lacking courage and resolution : marked by contemptible timidity’. Is a contraction of this word from whence we get ‘pussy’? In other words, men are now told to be pussies, to apologize for their greatness (in whatever way they are great I suppose – great handymen, with the barbecue, as lovers? – ) and expound on their defects: geesh is that ever true. We trade stories of misery just not seem better than other people.
Instead of a man who is ambitious in his desire of honor, men are now told to seek the lowly and to be meek. Instead of a man who is patient in response to his passions, men are now told to cry uncontrollably, to let their emotions pour out. Instead of a man who is truthful, men are now told that white lies are okay, and that it is better to flatter than to “offend”. Instead of a man who is righteously indignant, men are now told to turn the other cheek; to forgive and forget; to be compassionate to our worst enemies.
// I agree with all of this up until the dig at compassion. Showing compassion to one’s enemies is something only a strong person can do. We see it even in the way Alexander the Great treated his defeated enemies. Showing compassion makes us better than psychopaths.
And instead of a man who is just, men are now told to trade favors, to barter for social acceptance, to achieve by means of social connections, to be tolerant of all opinions, and to love thy neighbor as thyself.
// ‘to love thy neighbor …’ means that true Christians are pussies and have been since the fall of the Roman Empire? This dig begins to get at Nietzche’s ideas about a Master and a Slave Morality, the later of course being the ‘good life ideas’ of the Christians.
This interests me because of my developing ideas about being a man in this society where feminism has been wonderfully successful, and as I grow away from the way I felt about patriarchy at age 25.
My visceral loathing for Bush II began with that disgust for patriarchy, but I should develop this to say that patriarchy is and was repulsive to me because of it’s lunk-headed stupidity, especially in the face of oppression and environmental destruction. It is further exemplified by the way the media uses fat and stupid men in sitcoms to be ‘everyman’ who find a sense of manliness through the eating of meat. Overweight, unhealthy men who obsess over a food which should be a rarity, (not a staple) represent ‘everyman’? I don’t think so. There is also an unfornuate characteristic of patriarchy that glorifies in combat and competition, which is why I could tell during the debates Bush had with Al Gore in 2000 that he’d get the country into a war somehow, since he was such a patriarchial figure-head.
Why are sophisticated wine-snobs never represented on sitcoms or commercials without also being pusillanimous at the same time? Think of Frasier on the eponymous sitcom and his brother Myles. Think of how Myles is also the name of the character in the 2004 film Sideways, the sophisticated writer and wine-snob who is also timid and emotionally devastated by his divorce, while his friend Jack is the lunk-headed fun-loving (probably meat-eating) fellow out to get laid before his wedding day, behaving in a way that is unethical in more than one moral context.
The stupid men stereotypes are the ones prone to be defended by women who should know better (as the sitcom men where once for me) as ‘representing everyman’. Is this because it conforms most readily to their anti-masculine ideology?
This ideology permeates the art world. Take this press-release from last September for example, with my emphasis:
Celebratory Angst: Riggin’ the Exhaust
Steven LaurieUniversity of Western Ontario MFA Thesis Exhibition
Location: ArtLab (UWO Campus/ Visual Arts Building)
Dates of Exhibition: September 16 – 30
Opening Reception: Friday, September 16, 5-7 pm
Description of Exhibition:
Through the use of the suburban backyard/garage as a platform, I am interested in the ideas, images, and behaviors that are culturally recognized as ‘normative’ masculine qualities, and how they influence gender performance. This body of work makes use of the contradictions found within gender-based constructs while attempting to critically address the relationship between labor and leisure and the performances of the everyday.
My current studio practice involves the modification and tuning of gas powered machines that meld the impetuous activities of burning rubber and revving with the aspects of utility and desire. Through isolating and amplifying particular actions, stereotypes and clich???s usually assigned to a masculine proviso, I develop hyper-masculine tools that emphasize the relationship between the male body, extension/attachment and exhibitionism. By using steel, readily available machine parts and exhaust tips I am exploring the intricate ideas of masculinity through the critical perspectives of anxiety and celebration.
My objections to this are that I don’t think gender is any more a performance than sex – that is, the ‘performance’ is very much preprogrammed. We thrust our hips therein instinctively, not because we took fucking lessons. The so called ‘normative’ of male behavior is also very much instinctive, but includes the behaviour of intelligent and sophisticated men, not just the fools, of that common majority that creates the ‘normative’ idea in the first place.
So, Mr. Artist is interested in it, and that means what? – he does a bunch of stuff mocking the subject matter. Imagine if anthropologists, instead of writing descriptive papers and documenting and archiving the culture, enacted performances that mocked their subjects. ‘I’m a native tribesman, I fuck 12 year old girls, I slaughter wild pigs with my bare hands and I believe in forest spirits’. The girl who hates men does a dance, her face skewed into a ugly pose, as she tried to bring out the primitive brutality of her tribal fellow. The audience sips beer and laughs. Afterward they congratulate her. The art world becomes a bunch of self-satisfied assholes who want to mock and encourage divisiveness.
Through my art-world dealings, I find myself on the defensive at times about being a straight (white) man, and why? I see men degraded all around me today and find that as offensive as what women experienced in the 1950s. What does it mean to be a man today, and why should we put up with feminist degradation? I think this is both a fair question and a fair critique of the environment encouraged by feminists, many of whom would prefer to view gender as a performance rather than something deeply genetic. But this is not to say that type of testosterone shock-jock (who are the male gender’s bimbos who degrade us all) is something acceptable either, but is something uncivilized and barbaric.
This type of research into what could be called conservative patriarchal bullshit is thus leading me to want to read Aristotle’s Niomachean Ethics which as I’ve already said, is part of the larger project of understanding different moral/ethical orders as differing visions of the good life.
Which brings me to Brad Pitt; perhaps he best exemplifies our culture’s considerations of manliness. He certainly leads a good life, at least according to what this culture values. He dated Gwyneth Paltrow when she was marketed as the perfect woman, then he married a TV star when she was considered the perfect woman, and now he’s having a baby with a woman considered to be the sexiest woman alive or some such thing. Beyond his famous good looks he’s wealthy and said to be smart, with an interest in architecture (friends with Frank Gehry no less). And, he’s a vegetarian. When you need a manly man for a movie (which function to advertise a variety of moral visions), who does’t eat ‘mheeet’ Pitt’s your man.
He’s Achilles in 2004’s Troy but he is also Tyler Durden in 1999’s Fight Club, which is perhaps our fucked up culture’s version of the Niomachean Ethics. Fight Club‘s a morality tale that had resonance with me, presenting a vision of a good life based on an anti-consumerist ethic and mocking corporate psychopathy. It is also one that begins to question our society’s ideas about manliness. As in for example, this line
Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is it essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No.
Or, this:
Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
Did not get up till about 10.45 this morning. After breakfast father, Mr. Lay & myself walked to Nordheimer’s hill & back, I had dinner early & left for the Woodbine race at 2 o’clock. Got there shortly after 2.30 sat most of the afternoon in the Press seats in the Grand Stand, where I wrote up the account for the Associated Press. I walked to the betting rings to watch the crowd. I must confess that a mingled feeling of disgust contempt & sadness came over me as I saw the mass of men with apparently no high thoughts or desires wasting or risking what money they might possess. The class are a hard one to deal with. So too, the Society set, poor feeble minded creatures only pleasure to be looked at & to look at others. I did not enjoy the races much. Sent off the account at 6.30, had supper, have been writing since – felt the influence of Mr. Winchester’s sermon.
Of course, today we’d call ‘the Society Set’ celebrities or just plain socialites. However, in the century since this time, we’ve decided that casinos are a worthy way to supplement tax revenue, which, as then, comes from folk of ‘apparently no high thoughts or desires wasting or risking what money they might possess.’
My department occasionally receives self-published books from people who think philosophers, of all people, should want to know the TRUTH. As such, I can say with a certainty that no rambling philosophical treatise is compete without mention of:1. Unified Field Theory which combines electromagnetism with sexual ergons as theorized by Wilhelm Reich!
2. Antimatter and antigravity
3. Monadic collider for analysis of sub-monadic particles!
4. Qualia as Gravitons
5. Exceptions to the incest taboo.
6. Harmonic meditation techniques for world peace
7. Blurbs from Robert Pirsig and the guy who wrote the Tao of Pooh.
8. The secret treatise contained within Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian. Guess what? He actually is.
9. Master race theory is optional, but you can bet you aren’t a member.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:13 PM PST on May 9
From The Satyricon of Petronius (60 AD): with highlights:
Meantime I found it no easy task to overcome my thirst for revenge, and spent half the night in anxious debate. In hopes, however, of beguiling my melancholy and forgetting my wrongs, I rose at dawn and visited all the different colonnades, finally entering a picture gallery, containing admirable paintings in various styles. There I beheld Zeuxis’ handiwork, still unimpaired by the lapse of years, and scanned, not without a certain awe, some sketches of Protogenes’, that vied with Nature herself in their truth of presentment. Then I reverently admired the work of Apelles, of the kind the Greeks call “monochromatic”; for such was the exquisite delicacy and precision with which the figures were outlined, you seemed to see the very soul portrayed. Here was the eagle towering to the sky and bearing Ganymede in its talons. There the fair Hylas, struggling in the embraces of the amorous Naiad. Another work showed Apollo cursing his murderous hand, and bedecking his unstrung lyre with blossoms of the new-sprung hyacinth.
Standing surrounded by these painted images of famous lovers, I ejaculated as if in solitary self-communion, “Love, so it seems, troubles even the gods. Jupiter could discover no fitting object of his passion in heaven, his own domain; but though condescending to earthly amours, yet he wronged no trusting heart. Hylas’ nymph that ravished him would have checked her ardor, had she known Hercules would come to chide her passion. Apollo renewed the memory of his favorite in a flower; and all these fabled lovers had their way without a rival’s interference. But I have taken to my bosom a false-hearted friend more cruel than Lycurgus.”
But lo! while I am thus complaining to the winds of heaven, there entered the colonnade an old white-headed man, with a thought-worn face, that seemed to promise something mysterious and out of the common. Yet his dress was far from imposing, making it evident he belonged to the class of men of letters, so ill-looked upon by the rich. This man now came up to me, saying, “Sir! I am a poet, and I trust of no mean genius, if these crowns mean anything, which I admit unfair partiality often confers on unworthy recipients. ‘Why then,’ you will ask, ‘are you so poorly clad?’ Just because I am a genius; when did love of art ever make a man wealthy?
The sea-borne trafficker gains pelf untold;
The hardy soldier wins his spoil of gold;
The sycophant on Tyrian purple lies;
The base adulterer with Croesus vies.
Learning alone, in shuddering rags arrayed,
Vainly invokes th’ indifferent Muses’ aid!
“No doubt about it; if any man declare himself the foe of every vice, and start boldly on the path of rectitude, in the first place the singularity of his principles makes him odious, for who can approve habits so different from his own? Secondly, men whose one idea is to pile up the dollars cannot bear that others should have a nobler creed than they live by themselves. So they spite all lovers of literature in every possible way, to put them into their proper place–below the money-bags.”
“I cannot understand why poverty is always talent’s sister,” I said, and heaved a sigh.
“You do well,” returned the old man, “to deplore the lot of men of letters.”
“Nay!” I replied, “that was not why I sighed; I have another and a far heavier reason for my sorrow!”–and immediately, following the common propensity of mankind to pour one’s private griefs into another’s ear, I told him all my misfortunes, inveighing particularly against Ascyltos’ perfidy, and ejaculating with many a groan, “Would to heaven my enemy, the cause of my present enforced continence, had any vestige of good feeling left to work upon; but ’tis a hardened sinner, more cunning and astute than the basest pander.”
Pleased by my frankness, the old man tried to comfort me; and in order to divert my melancholy thoughts, told me of an amorous adventure that had once happened to himself.
[…]
Enlivened by this discourse, I now began to question my companion, who was better informed on these points than myself, as to the dates of the different pictures and the subjects of some that baffled me. At the same time I asked him the reason for the supineness of the present day and the utter decay of the highest branches of art, and amongst the rest of painting, which now showed not the smallest vestige of its former excellence.
“It is greed of money,” he replied, “has wrought the change. In early days, when plain worth was still esteemed, the liberal arts flourished, and the chief object of men’s emulation was to ensure no discovery likely to benefit future ages long remaining undeveloped. To this end Democritus extracted the juices of every herb, and spent his life in experimenting, that no virtue of mineral or plant might escape detection. In a similar way Eudoxus grew gray on the summit of a lofty mountain, observing the motions of the stars and firmament, while Chrysippus thrice purged his brain with hellebore, to stimulate its capacity and inventiveness. But to consider the sculptors only,–Lysippus was so absorbed in the modeling of a single figure that he actually perished from lack of food, and Myron, who came near embodying the very souls of men and beasts in bronze, died too poor to find an heir.
“But we, engrossed with wine and women, have not the spirit to appreciate the arts already discovered; we can only criticize Antiquity, and devote all our energies, in precept and practice, to the faults of the old masters. What is become of Dialectic? of Astronomy? of Philosophy, that richly cultivated domain? Who nowadays has ever been known to enter a temple and engage to pay a vow, if only he may attain unto Eloquence, or find the fountain of wisdom? Not even do sound intellect and sound health any longer form the objects of men’s prayers, but before ever they set food on the threshold of the Capitol, they promise lavish offerings, one if he may bury a wealthy relative, another if he may unearth a treasure, another if only he may live to reach his thirty million. The very Senate, the ensample of all that is right and good, is in the habit of promising a thousand pounds of gold to Capitoline Jove, and that no man may be ashamed of the lust of pelf, bribes the very God of Heaven. What wonder then if Painting is in decay, when all, gods and men alike, find a big lump of gold a fairer sight than anything those crack-brained Greek fellows, Apelles and Phidias, ever wrought.
As cultural professionals, you or I should study all the things, regardless of whether they speak to us on a deep personal level. But generally speaking, you only need a couple of paintings, a couple of poems, a couple of pieces of music to last a whole lifetime. I have succeeded if a person walks away with one image, one thought, one realization, one feeling that they can use in their life, even if they can’t remember my name, the names of the pieces, or how many they say. – Bill Viola
[…] Christopher Hutsul (or Christopher the Younger, as we like to call him) argues for ways the city can nurture its creative communities, including decriminalizing graffiti. Local “thinker” Timothy Comeau critiques this suggestion and many others on Good Reads.
Toronto isn’t the best place to live right now. With the two centerpieces of this city’s culture currently undergoing renovations, and with the Power Plant gallery continuing to highlight just how irrelevant and uninteresting most contemporary art is, I find myself bored more often that I’d like to be. But the talk is of a cultural renaissance and the city is looking for some kind of vision for itself. One problem: this is the corporate centre of Canada, and corporations are lousy at vision. Look at advertising – it has become the dominant cultural and visual expression of our society. Pompeii was frozen in time and its frescoes were preserved. Such a disaster in Toronto would only preserve a galaxy of images of vacant expressions and languid poses.And the graffiti. God bless the graffiti. A recent book suggests the ancient cave painting of Europe had more in common to graffiti than they do to religious iconography, which personally makes sense. (However, since we fundamentally know nothing about the cave paintings, they will always be susceptible to fashionable interpretation: a century ago when religion was taken more seriously, they had religious meaning. Now that religion has faded in importance, they’re graffiti. A century from now, a new reading perhaps based on whatever reality is present at that time).
Christopher Hutsul, in today’s Toronto Star, interviewed some people about Toronto’s cultural vision. He spoke to Fiona Smyth, Matthew Teitelbaum (of the AGO) and Sarah Diamond (the new president of OCAD). Why Smyth was chosen to be the voice of Toronto’s artists, I don’t know. I guess he could have picked worse … there are plenty worse. Smyth hasn’t been relevant to the Toronto scene for a decade (at least that’s my understanding). When asked about her vision, Hutsul wrote:
“For painter Fiona Smyth, graffiti should be flat-out decriminalized. ‘Billboards are taking over,’ she says. ‘Every available space is being grabbed by corporations, and graffiti can be a counterpoint to that …. ‘ The art form could extend to our rooftops, which Smyth believes are an untapped resource for gallery space. She imagines a city where rooftops are connected by a network of catwalks and feature sculptures, art pieces and gardens.”
I have some idea of what she’s smoking, but I’d like to point out that artists really need to get off the anti-billboard bandwagon. Only because, we get it. Imagine you want to suggest a new strategy, argue a point, or hell, even get laid. There’s a progression that occurs in proposition, argument and in seduction. You do not belabor the first step. You move forward. Yes billboards suck. Next…..
There’s a self-consciousness at the moment in the Left of what has gone wrong … and this failure to evolve the message is surely one of the problems. Our city is over-corporatized, billboards are part of that, but graffiti is not an antidote to them. Graffiti can be as much of an eyesore … one person’s masterpiece is another’s whack job, and so we need to keep this in mind. I for one like how graffiti throws down some colour on the otherwise gray landscape, shows some imagination.
We shouldn’t even try to understand architects who think raw concrete is lovely, let’s not waste the energy. But let’s think of how there are paint factories in the world capable of producing enough paint to cover the CN Tower if we so chose.
The tower for one is nice enough as it is, but we’re also used to it that way. We are also used to thinking that ancient Greco-Roman architecture was purely white. But it wasn’t – the Greeks and Romans painted their buildings – they seemed to enjoy colour. They seemed to have suffered from the fear of empty spaces known as horror vacui. Yet, in our day and age, the pure white walled room is the temple of contemporary art and culture. The overall message is that colour is bad, somehow not pure, because of the puritan pollution of neo-classicism which still lingers in the mind of the cultural. Rooftops of gardens and sculptures is something they might have done 2000 years ago, but I don’t really think sculpture has much relevance and I further imagine the sculpture would be like the shit atop the poles on Spadina … pure eyesores.
Calling for catwalks and sculpture gardens is just asking for more space to put up advertising kiosks like Derek Sulivan did. Was his project a critique of capitalism, or the suggestion that billboards are ok, as long as they imitate what was done in Europe a century ago?
Teitelbaum suggests expanding the AGO’s exhibitions to outside the space … put stuff up at Union Stn and similar. I suppose he hasn’t walked through BCE place at any time in the past few years, or through that office building on Yonge that had a space Paul Petro used to run. The BCE exhibitions are usually interesting, but ignored by the business people going to and fro. Union Stn wouldn’t work either – the space is too shitty (the Go Train space that is) and that would be your primary audience. People arriving on VIA would be too distracted by their trip to check out art, and no one from downstairs waiting for a Go Train would go upstairs, probably because the show would have stupid hours or be otherwise inaccessible.
The waterfront idea has some merit, but they’d be encroaching on the Power Plant’s territory, and then there’d be a turf war. Power Plant people bitching about the AGO, I can see it now, and it depresses me. But let’s move on to Sarah Diamond, who, it appears, is full of the vigour of naivte. ‘Look at me, I’m the president of an art school! Let’s have a Happening’. Jesus H Christ.
Yes, to reinvigorate our city’s cultural life, let’s go back 40 years, to a time when Henry Moore fell in love with Toronto out of spite. Happenings with scientists. I imagine Power Point presentations on quantum mechanics and relativity theory and oooh, dark matter. A real happening now involves nudity, cocaine, endless kegs, and music that hurts your ears. That’s not something likely to be sanctioned by corporate Canada and its funders.
Diamond goes on to say that arts need to be at the centre and not at the periphery – but they are at the periphery just as much as plumbing is to many of us – because the arts have become a little industry. I mean, if I needed a plumber, I wouldn’t know where to start to find one. It’s hard enough trying to find somebody to fix your computer, let alone your pipes. The arts are the same way. I happen to know lots of artists because I am an artist as well, because that’s my scene. I don’t know any plumbers or computer fix-it people. For Diamond to suggest moving the arts to the centre is the same as the president of plumbing college saying people need to pay more attention to their pipes. Ain’t going to happen darling.
Nor should we have a crowd of artists at Pearson to welcome passengers. Lame lame lame …. I’m not that surprised she got hired on with these splendid ideas. OCAD doesn’t cease to underwelm me (although I was impressed they’d moved their library catalogue to a self-designed Linux system the last time I was there). Artists at Pearson would send a strangely parochial message, suggesting we’re so desperate for other people’s attention that we’re going to do a song and dance and paint them pretty pictures as soon as they get off the plane.
As opposed to a place like New York. You know what New York’s philosophy is don’t you? It’s Fuck You. That’s why people want to go there. Because their amazing, they know it, and because this gives them the self-confidence to be brash and rude and bold. So they can afford to say Fuck You. Toronto: please come see our hobbits on stage! Look at our shiny artists, aren’t we special? When Toronto has the balls to kiss off the rest of the world as we do the rest of Canada (not for nothing we’re so despised) then the world will take notice, find us interesting, and you won’t need artists at the airports. A healthy culture is not a self-conscious culture. Nor is a healthy culture one that looks to Yorkville celebrities as a source of identity, as happens every September.
The article ends with two poets. “Molly Peacock, poetry editor at the Literary Review of Canada, suggests we stamp poetry into every new sidewalk square. Peacock, who helped bring ‘Poetry in Motion’ to the New York transit system, says if this were to happen, we’d be ‘the most marvellously literary city in the world.'”
This would probably make me hate poetry. I like it on the subway, but on sidewalks like this I’d find it oppressive, overwhelming, and a gross validation of text over speech, which isn’t a balance we should be persuaded to topple. If we get all offended by the stupid adverts everywhere, wouldn’t text everywhere underfoot be a similar violation of public space?
The second poet highlights the idea that poets are useless twits who merely have a way with words. “Sonnet L’Abbé believes the key to a more artful city is for people to ‘ease up on the gas’ in the pursuit of economic prosperity and make a ‘personal commitment to loving art. And when I say loving, I mean paying attention to it, getting to know, not just throwing money at it. It’s like a person growing their own artistic flower … If you have enough flowers, then the whole city becomes a garden of people who love and consume and make art.'”
We shouldn’t be asking people who failed chemistry in highschool to suddenly become chemists. ‘Get to know chemistry …’ they’d say, ‘fall in love with the test tube’. Ridiculous. You can’t ask this of people.
But you can try to create an environment where culture is an ambient reality, so that whenever the interests is sparked, they’ll know how to follow it. Recently I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to meet a friend and with time to spare, I dropped into the ROM to check out the Greek artifacts and to familiarize myself with the world of those stories. This is what living in the city means to me – the availability of material for the pursuit of my interests. Libraries, galleries, museums … these are there so that we can grow as individuals, so that we can learn something about the world and what it means to be human.
Gardens and sculptures are lame because they are window dressing, imitations of a style that meant something thousands of years ago, when the statues were of gods or heroes. Exhibitions in transit areas are stupid because those are spaces designed to be moved through… and artists at air ports are foolish because only cultures who are trying to impress the bigger more powerful ones are prone to do something like that.
Toronto is not New York because we don’t have the cultural wealth. Build up the wealth by supporting the artists who work here, and by collecting masterpieces from around the world (and not just from the Anglo-American Empire), and then the city could facilitate cultural individuals. As it is, the city’s best libraries are the university ones, which are limited to the public, and the institutions are more interested in their face lifts.
Canada is a great country and I’m of the opinion that a whole generation of artists and the like are currently working in the city, a generation that will be read about in tomorrow’s history books. Forget Andy Warhol, and Happenings, and all that shit New York did in the 1960s. Toronto’s 1960s moment is right now, and let’s pay attention to those artists if you want to feel like you’re living in a culturally vibrant, exciting, and relevant place.
Gay, au comte Digby en Nouvelle-Ecosse (BOW
2Z0) Canada.
Come project pour la semaine d’ Education nous
asayon de faire de nouvelles connaissance a
travers la mer.
Ou et quand as-ti trouve cette lettre? Qui est tu?
Box 68 Saulnierville
Digby Conty Ton nouvelle [ami]
Timothy Comeau
————————————-
[or, en anglais:]
April 7, 1986
My name is Timothy Comeau.
I am in 5th Grade at Jean-Marie Gay School, in the county of Digby in Nova Scotia (BOW 2Z0) Canada. As a project for Education Week we are trying to meet new people through the sea. Where and when have you found this letter? Who are you?
Box 68 Saulnierville
Digby Conty Your new friend,
Timothy Comeau
————————————-
// La Semaine d”education was our favorite time of the year, since it was the week for projects such as these, and roadtrips. I always loved the road trips: the museums in the valley – Fort Anne, Port Royal; the government projects: the tidal power generation station in 1987, listening to Bon Jovi on the bus ride home. We were given a pen to write this letter with, a special pen with indellible ink. It was made to seem all fancy and expensive. Later, with the whole art thing, I recognized the pen as a simple drawing pen.The wine bottles were brought in by the teachers. They probably threw a party to get them all.
The bottles were taken out to sea by a father of one of my classmates. He brought them out beyond the tip of Nova Scotia and dumped them overboard. Two were found in Maine, I think, or at least one was. Another went to New Brunswick. In the year or two following we’d occasionally have a visitor at the school or a letter read from a person who’d found it. This letter arrived for me in 1988, by which time I was in junior high. My sister was at the elementary school and she brought it home. She said there’d been quite a commotion that day, when it arrived. At first I had trouble reading the letter, since the indenting seem exagerated and the ‘m’ looked like ‘n’ or ‘w’s or whatever.
…or the ones from England, Sweden, Canada, whatever. How many of these franchises are there? And what do they all mean?
I’ve said before in conversation that the Idol franchise is remarkable in that it proves that young people aren’t apathetic about voting – they don’t seem to mind voting with their cell phones for pop singers. Further, this willingness to co-opt democracy for cultural workers says something about how we don’t live in a Spartan (Greek/Athenian) or Philistine (Hebrew) culture. We live in one that cherishes a certain kind of art, rather than the lame foolishness of galleries.
I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes lately. And some of Aesychlus – I’ve never had that much interest before and remember ten years ago listening to some friends in uni talking about Oedipus Rex and I couldn’t believe anyone would want to read Greek plays nowadays – too old fashioned. But what one gets out of ancient Greek literature is a recognition of some constants of human nature, and a better understanding of the theatre and through this, the attractions of film and television.
But one notes that the playwrights were competing, that the theatre evolved out of a presentation or ritual and a festival. It seems that the same impulse that gave rise to the theatre in ancient Athens is the same that gives rise to American Idol. An audience, voting for the performers in their spectacle. The Greek playwrights told the stories of the city, commenting and alluding to things in a way that we see in sketch comedy shows today, especially something like Saturday Night Live. But SNL is known to be the result of a collective effort, and there’s no voting for the best skit or skit writer.
If the theatre expressed the beliefs of the Athenians, and held a mirror up to their city-state civilization, what does the Idol franchise express? That consumerism is a functional religion for an otherwise collective secular civilization. Because the Idol franchise operates in more than one country, it shows that our civilization is no longer confined to individual nation states, but is spread across a lingu franca English world which we usually call Western. We could just as easily call it the Idolic, given our love of idol worship (see John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards Chapter 11).
Our animated images function as gods, ghosts, angels … we have a whole pantheon of celebrity that goes back to this Greek heritage. This Idolic civilization claims to be secular, but is so in practice only, because each nation state has a population of believers within it. It also seems clear that the human being must take a position on a matter of belief: either they’re for a spiritual life, or their not; either they believe in some god, or they don’t; but that’s to say that spirit cannot be a vacuum: something will rush into to fill that void.
Our secular society, which in uncomfortable with open displays of belief, encourages everyone to be in the closet about these matters and functionally consumerist in public. This is what most often fills in that void. But it’s also not that simple … as I write I’m thinking of teenage girls in sneakers and lip gloss, caught up in that superficial world, and asking where does an idea of god fit into that? It’s another aspect of our Idolic civilization: everything is image, everything is mediated by the potential presence of the camera, to look hot is to praise whatever. Is sex our secular god? We all want to look hot to play with the image of sex?
Too often we use the word consumerism, implying that buying stuff is what we want. It seems that we all want style, beauty, cool, attractiveness … things that live up to a religion of image rather than belief. As I write this I’m also trying to figure in the stupid people who gossip about the love lives of their friends at work, who invest in Disney DVDs, whose entire lives seem cliché ridden and empty of what we could call culture in an elitist way. Not that these are bad people, and it seems a given that they’ll always exist, but they’re boring and distasteful. They’re probably quick to identify as Christians as well, so they’re caught between two belief systems: the one they live, and they one they think they live: that is, what they’d tell you despite the evidence. Such a disparity is a sign of unconsciousness, and perhaps that accounts for their appearance of stupidity and the dullness of their conversation. They’re really quite asleep. Or watching the flickering shadows of the television.
The Idol music festival is not designed to praise Dionysus or one particular pantheonic god (accept for maybe Simon Cowell) but is instead designed to generate a market for a forthcoming CD by the winner chosen by the cell-phone voting audience. It’s brilliant marketing, and has unfortunately been copied by everyone. But the willingness to adopt this method to sell speaks of what we consider to be important: living up to an image we come to know through marketing.
And that, my friends, is mostly it for the 1986 diary entries. There is something in April to look forward to, and after this point twenty years ago, I didn’t write anything in the diary again until September.
I love how the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art is honoring American art stars. Last November it was Vito Acconci; this April it’s Carolee Schneemann. Be good little provincial rubes and get your tickets now.
The house is ours!1 That’s a nice house I tell ya!
_______________________ 1. I remember him with the rumpled look of the time which has been captured in some photos. The thick beard. The lumberjack clothes. He comes in the door and says its ours and my sister and I rush to hug him. We were excited about moving for all the usual reasons. The calendar tells me it was a Tuesday; we’d come home from school, and he’d been out negotiating. Worked out the deal, got the papers signed or whatever. Twenty years later he makes a show of the slowness of the corn syrup, saying it’s like molasses in January, although we have central heating now and he never eats molasses anyway. Time has shaved off the beard and etched gray into the air, and taken away a healthy plumpness which never turned obese and which I think I’ve inherited. He fills the coffee mug with the ice cream, a chore since the block is frozen hard. Then the patience of the thick corn syrup, which he’s always enjoyed with ice-cream.
We went to check out a house. Well, I think we might move.1
_________________ 1.On 1986: When I later went to artschool and was taught about Modernism I never thought I would one day apply to that idea to my life, but I see it now quite clearly as an apt was of summing up 1986. For, in my mind, there is striation of a pre-1986 world, and the post-1986 world, and for years, the post 1986 world was the Modern one. The world of now, the present, the near yesterday. Of course, this is now 20 years later, and I can look back as to why 1986 had a different flavour and immediacy because of the way this day shaped by experience.
We went to check out a house. The folks had been looking to move for a while so we’d been to other houses. I vividly remember the dandelions in Comeauville the day we went to see the house with a turret. That must have been the previous May. On this day, as we walked in the front door, I can still see the boys in the field across the street playing around their little salvaged-plywood fort. We toured the house and went home, and I don’t really remember much about that – the boys in the field is what has stayed with me clearly.
Twenty years later, I was told, I’d be sitting in a dentist’s chair, with a mask over my nose, breathing laughing gas. Twenty years from now, it’ll be a Thursday, whispered, and this is what you’ll see. Pink and yellow and blue. Their faces over you. Reminded of those silly scenes in movies where doctors look down over the camera. The pinch and the flash as the teeth are removed. I didn’t feel a thing. This isn’t a big deal. Wow. Did you get it all out? All of it? All of it, she answers. She’s very pretty, and you keep thinking that’s half the sedation right there – to have such a pretty girl to look at during the procedure. Later the freezing wears off and you’re two teeth short of a full set, but have gone through the initiation rite of our culture, to have some wisdom teeth sacrificed to the gods of good dentistry. The coincidence is a little staggering actually, isn’t it: you sacrifice your wisdom teeth to become a full adult in this culture of stupidity. Or maybe I’m just being cynical. Of course, what does recuperation consists of? Channel surfing. Too distracted by the wounds to try reading, you listen to CBC3 podcasts with the TV on mute, and go round and round and round. Like Sampson’s haircut, your dental procedure has made you vulnerable to celebrity gossip and marketing campaigns.
But twenty years before, it was the prospect of moving, which opened a new chapter into your life.
Well, it’s the last week of bowling. Next week’s a banquet.1
_____________ 1. I bowled on Saturdays and found it boring. Or maybe that was the following year … anyway, the banquet was something to look forward to. Little more than a potluck, it to, if I remember correctly, was boring.
R’s1 party was the pits. The car almost didn’t start to go to that garbage.
_____________
1. As I recall, the car almost didn’t start because of the cold. R was my best friend through gradeschool, although it seems to me that our friendship would come to a close within the year, if I remember correctly. This party was a sleepover, and I recall being in the top bunk and freaked out by the general weirdness of the thing. R’s brother was a bully who I think spent time in reform school … and then these girls showed up who were intimating sexuality in ways that I wasn’t ready for which freaked me out even more. I got mad at them and told them I wasn’t ready to have sex, although I was probably overreacting, since they were trying to seduce us or anything – they were maybe 13 or 14 themselves, but needless to say, the atmosphere wasn’t one were I felt comfortable. Hence, ‘the party was the pits’.
My parents got home from concert. Been coksing to go to Yarmouth demain.1
______________ 1. Revisiting these entries twenty years later brings back at times a surprising detail of memory, while other times reminding me of things forgotten, while also recording things for which I have no memory. For example, in the past couple of days, I’d forgotten why my grandmother came to take care of us, and yet today I see it was because my parents had gone to a concert in Halifax. They’d parked the car and saw some pop star … I don’t remember who, and no point in asking them since there’s no way they’d remember anyway. What I do remember is being told that someone had broken into all the cars parked along side the road, except for theirs. But, that story may refer to another concert they went to at another time.
What I don’t remember is using the term ‘coksing’ at this age, which I find remarkable. When I first typed up these entries some time ago, I thought it might be a typo, until realizing that it was an expression that had somehow filtered into Clare from the metropoles. It was the mid-80s and cocaine, I am now told, was everywhere, to the point that 11 year olds were prone to say they were coksing to go town the next day.
Saturday March 15 1975He decided he liked sitting in his chair for a while each day on March 15 1975.
I think this must be a prelude to what I’ve come to enjoy as an adult: beginning the day with a cup of coffee, sitting at the table, looking outside, or otherwise quietly composing my thoughts. At the point this was writen I was a month and half old.
Eleven years later, I wrote this in my first attempt at keeping a diary:
Saturday 15 March 1986You know, I was trying to break world records today. Very good like all my Saturdays are.
I don’t remember what world records I was trying to break. Possibly something involving jumping. One shouldn’t picture anything worthy of note, but rather something foolish, pathetic and yet charming due to it coming from an 11 year old’s jouissance.
Ten years after that – and ten years ago – on 15 March 1996, I wrote:
Friday 15 March 1996. I slept in accidentally, and missed Applied Ant.1 I went to linguistics, but was late. E2 and I went to the communications lab. After, I told D3 that I needed a transcription, she said come back around 2:30. So, from 1.30 to 2 I talked with M4 on the 5th, they then had to go, so I waited around for D, who bothered me by standing too close and invading my personal space. Then I went home, and hanged out with S5, did my laundry, and talked with W6 who came for K7, who wasn’t home yet. After [they] took off I killed time until 5:40 when I went to see J8 at work. We talked, and I took off around 7, and she told me she might see me later at the Seahorse, where I went around 10:30, because I was supposed to meet Ba9 and Br10 there. I saw none of them, so I left at ten to twelve after two draught and went home and worked on my journal entry.
This alphabet of first initials consists of these letters:E, D, M, S, W, K, J, B & B. I plugged those into an anagram generator and they gave me a list of words including: bed, webs, desk, skew, sew, jew, and bmw. Nevertheless, I’ve been reduced to this alphabet perhaps due to the mistaken notion that I’m protecting the identities of those involved. Note 1: Applied Anthropology class, which I was studying at Saint Marys. Note 2: a classmate with whom I was doing a project (I think). Note 3: My professor, who a friend of mine (now a lawyer) thought was a milf, although we didn’t have that term at the time to describe her that way. Note 4: M, a girl on the 5th floor of the residence. S, the subject of Note 5, was one of my roommates, and the other roommate was Note 7, Mr. K. Mr. W, Note 6, I don’t remember. J, Note 8, was a girl I was quite fond of, which is a bit of understatement considering I was all in love with her. Love at first sight is both embarrassing and real. She was mean to me and became a lesbian and if I saw her again today, I’d fully expect her to continue being mean to me, her bitchiness both a part of her nature and one of the reasons I was attracted to her in the first place. Or perhaps she’s nice now, in which case it’d be nice to drink wine with her and catch up. Notes 9 and 10: the B-boys: friends from when we lived in the same residence.
Eight years later, on Mon. 15 March 2004 I sat where I’m sitting now, and using the same computer I’m using now, I bought my webspace, having acquired the goodreads.ca domain name the week before.
Well I tell you every test I’m getting this week is nearly all F’s.1. Bad you Tim, bad boy.
_______________ 1. I remember this was because of the commotion surrounding my grandfather’s death, when homework and studying was the least of my concerns.
video art: In the late 20th Century, art had become so vague a concept that it was colonized by a variety of practices which otherwise had their own industries. Movie makers called themselves video artists. Actors called themselves performance artists. Set designers called themselves installation artists. A language centering on ‘exploration’ developed, so that there were two generations of people trying to figure out what one could do with a technology besides what it was designed for. Was a TV merely for watching tv shows? Was a video camera merely used to record the type of boring stuff one saw in TV shows? These were the types of questions being asked, so that by the time computers and digital video cameras become widely available to the mainstream, the artists had already been trying for 30 years to figure out what more one could do with it, resulting in much work that is no more watchable and comparable to great art than a scientist’s lab-notebook is comparable to great literature. It wasn’t until the capacity for unintentional masterpieces brought about by the computer and the na??ve mainstream video editor that one could begin to talk about a genuine video art. An example in addition to just about anything on Viral Video
Coincidences: a pattern of perception which lends itself to superstition, although if one refuses to indulge in superstition, can find some amusement from them. Examples include:Bush and Quail: quails are birds that hide in bushes. An American president named Bush picked as his vice-president a man named Quayle. This president’s son, also named Bush, picked a vice-president who accidentally shot his friend while hunting quail.
Ford and the Presidents: President Lincoln was assassinated in the Ford’s Theatre in 1865. In the early 20th Century, Henry Ford made the horseless carriage affordable which revolutionized American society and created an eponymous brand, so that by 1963, President Kennedy could be assassinated while riding in a Ford Lincoln convertible.
Good day. Had lobster for super. Airwolf was good. Cob’s1 was good to.
________________ 1. I was quite a fan of Airwolf. Twenty years later, I find myself watching Battlestar Galactica on Saturday nights. I remember Cob’s to have been a television show, but I’ve been unable to find anything on it through Google, which probably means that I spelled the show’s name wrong, or that it wasn’t actually called Cob’s.
Left school early. I cried at the funeral. Went in a limo! Went to bed at 12:00.1
___________________
1. I was up late because of the wake, in which many people got drunk. My specific memory is being under the dinning room table and laughing hard at the stories being told by my grandfather’s old friend and one time neighbor, Dr. Felix, who’d also served as the family doctor to my aunts and uncles. I remember finding one story particularyly funny, and that one being the tale of my uncle’s hunting injury, when he’d been shot in the leg as a young man.
This was the first and last time I’d been in a limosine, driven to the funeral from the funeral home with my parents. The funeral itself was a strange affair – the church was packed (as my grandfather had been prominent) and there’d been more than one priest presiding, one of whom was a large man with a loud voice, and more than one person said, ‘he didn’t need a microphone’. When my other grandfather died in 1993, that funeral was a even stranger affair, as we all sat in a room off to the side of the usual … the pews reserved for people who weren’t members of the family, sequestered as we were. I’d have to turn my head to see the orations, look through the partitions in the wall. However, at this point, 7 years earlier, I sat in the pews next to my relatives in the Catholic church, and at the end, when they were wheeling the casket out and down the aisle, I let myself cry as the full weight of ‘I’ll never see him again’ hit me.
Same as Feb 24. Went to home. It snowed all day. He looks so good in that coffin.1
_________________ 1. I can see that I wrote this after the fact, filling in the events of Monday and Tuesday in the past tense. Thus, ‘same as Feb 24’ – we went to Weymouth, we went to the funeral home, my father taught me that relatives might want to shake my hand and say ‘mes sympathie’. I forget if he taught me what, if any, my response should be. The day before, the discussion around the kitchen table, my uncle talking about how my Grandfather had a loathing for funerals three days after a death, and how this was nonetheless what was going to take place.
At the funeral home that evening, it was kind of boring, kind of strange. My dead grandfather in the open casket to my left as I sat there and watched all the old people come to pay their respects. All very solemn and weird in the way that life’s rituals are weird when you’re a kid and you don’t quite get it. Around this time there was a drive with my Mom, I sitting in the passenger seat ‘up front’ and she saying the usual, ‘you can be happy he’s in a better place’ and perhaps this was the time, because we were talking about death, that I told her that sometimes I’m so curious about Heaven I can’t wait to get there, which she found a little alarming, of course. Now I have no interest in any of it whatsoever.
A year ago, I had this diary out and my sister found it and read some of it, finding it funny. At dinner that night my mother read from it and this day’s entry in particular made her laugh: ‘he looks so good in that coffin’. What I remember is looking at the still face of my grandfather, the mystery of death, and lightly touching his face to experience it in some way. But then I felt weird, because death=germs and all that, and I had a spell as a germophobe at around this time, during the mid-80s, so afterward, at my grandmother’s, I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d touched my grandfather and felt gross, because it felt shameful, and I washed my hands more than once. What I do remember was the coolness, and that lingering feeling of uncleanliness, and how I should have a more respectful feeling for my dead grandpa than simply feeling he was now gross.
Good and bad. Pretty good at beginning and bad at end. Grandpa died today.1
_________________
1. Some notes:
The Buddha was born in 2777 (according to my standardized chronology) and was 12 years old when Confucius was born in 2789. Confucius, it is said, ‘enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.’ (Wikipedia). This would have been in the 2790s. The Buddha left home to go on his journey of Enlightenment in 2806 at age 29, two years after Confucius began studying in 2804, as it is said, ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning’. The Buddha attained Enlightenment in 2812 at age 35, and Confucius tells us that in the year 2819 he took his stand. The Buddha died in 2857 at 80 and two years later, Confucius writes, ‘At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.’ Two years after that, in 2861 he died at age 72. Or perhaps he died at 71, before reaching his birthday that year.
Two-thousand four hundred and sixty five years later, in 5326, (otherwise known as 1986) my grandfather died at age 71, a man whose name is unknown to history, another blip in that great span of time between those ancients and ourselves. He is memory to me now, more legend than human to my cousins born after him, one of whom will be twenty this year. My grandfather was born to a lumberjack and housewife a few weeks into the events we now call World War I. At 31, (my present age) he saw my father for the first time, a baby born two weeks after Easter and two weeks before Hitler would shoot himself in a Berlin basement. Thirty years after that, I would be born, and now I’m at the age when I should be (according to this pattern) producing the fellow whose child will remember me twenty years after my death. If I were to die at my grandfather’s age, that would put this grandchild’s memory in the year 2066. But this pattern appears to be broken, since there’s no chance I’ll be having children anytime soon, and perhaps this also means I have more than 40 years left to live.
My father was in Moncton, my mother called him to tell him the news. I’d been playing with my Lego boat, my sister near me. She recieved the phone call and sat on the couch in the living room, and when she hung up told us that he’d passed away. My sister, crouching to my right, sprang up and ran to my mother and begain sobbing. I had a quiet and stunned reaction, yet joined the hug happening on the couch. The phone call to my father, away in some motel, and so to this day I don’t know how he reacted to the news his father had died. It’s also something I don’t feel it’s any of my business to find out.
It was a bit of surprise, since the week previous he’d been on the mend. The previous Thursday, when I went to the doctor’s regarding my pencil-wound, my mother and he had talked about how he’d been getting better, because the doctor was in fact my uncle. And yet fate intervened on this weekend in February, and a lifetime of smoking and drinking had worn out a body not destined to live to the Canadian life-expectancy of the time, which was 75. That’s what I remember thinking, as I’d recently learned about those statistics – that he’d died three years short of when ‘he was supposed to’, and yet that three year measure would only have been acurate had he made it to his next birthday that September. Had he made it to that birthday, he would have met his latest Grandchild born that August, a boy, a cousin to myself, the first son of my uncle, the third of my grandfather’s sons. At the news of my cousin’s birth I was happy since the responsibility of carrying on the family line no longer rested solely with me.
Fun day! A and S came. Had snowfall fight and played with computer.1
_____________ 1. A was my sister’s best friend, but S I don’t remember at all. Apparantly it snowed twenty years ago today, and the computer refered to was a Commodore 64, which I still have in the basement, and it still works to. I set it all up last in 2002 because I was working on a project that used it.
Good day. School strike began. Had to wait a half hour at doc’s1.
____________ 1. I went to the doctor’s with regard to my pencil wound. He said it was no big deal. By this time it was already dark with mark of the lead, he said it might stay that way, or something to that effect. He may of used hydrogen peroxide on it, but I don’t really remember. At age 11, a half-hour seemed like a long time.
Last month, I waited 45 minutes for my dentist appointment, watching Paul Martin give one of his pathetic campaign speeches. When I got home, I casually noticed the note I’d made on the calendar, which read ‘11.30’, and here I’d thought it’d been for 11. ‘That’s why I waited so long!’ I said to myself.
Good and bad. Michelle jammed a pencil in my arm.1 Just math for homework. Had fun playing with “Missile Man”.
_________________ 1. Michelle, my sister, was doing her math homework on the floor in the living room. I was bugging her and she got so angry with me she stabbed me in my left arm with her pencil. Well, she was trying to hit me and forgot she was holding a pencil, I guess we could say. It didn’t hurt so much but it was kind of shocking to see the pencil hanging from this wound, it’s lead tip embedded beneath the skin. She got into a world of trouble which I appreciated, since it was usually I who was in trouble.
To this day, I have a mark there, a little gray spot. It’s the only type of tattoo I ever received.
Made Lego boat. Named it “Missile Man” Had miny lauchment. We thought Grandpa might die that night.1 Made a spare on Bowling.2
_____________________ 1.I built this boat out of Lego, wrote ‘Missile Man’ on a peice of paper, which I taped to it’s bow. I playfully held a launch with some lego bottle or something. I remember playing with this while Airwolf was on tv. During the time my mother got a phone call; one of the relatives in Kentville calling in with a report on my ill Grandfather’s condition.
2. I used to bowl on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t enjoy it too much, as waiting around for my turn I found boring.
1st Week of February:
Islam, a religion as iconoclastic as early Judaism (golden calf) says: no pictures. Thus, representing the prophet is enough to inspire protests with regard to mediocre cartoons published four months ago.
2nd Week of February:
1. Photographs from Abu Ghriab, published two years ago, inspire outrage within the United States and the rest of the world. More photos from time of the first batch have been leaked to an Australian newspaper, likely to inspire more outrage. At the same time, a scandal brews in England due to the video (animated images) of soldiers beating Iraqis three years ago.
2. The actor in (what I consider to be offensive) ads for Alexander Keith’s is arrested for owning kiddie porn. Thus, he’s in legal trouble over our culture’s verboten images. Labatt’s, which owns Keith’s, announces they are pulling the ads, because they have suddenly been recontextualized in a way that makes them offensive … the taboo aura surrounding the kiddie porn pictures now influence the animated image of the actor stereotyping the Scottish as beligerent.
In John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards the chapter ‘Life in a Box – Specialization and the Individual’ concerns itself with our Modern Selves, and he writes:
While our mythology suggests that society is like a tree with the ripening fruits of professional individualism growing think upon it, a more accurate image would show a maze of corridors, blocked by endless locked doors, each one leading in or out of a small cell. (p. 507)
This image has thoroughly permeated my conscious understanding of this civilization, so much so that I saw it reflected at work and brought it up in the essay I submitted to a magazine recently. Two weekends ago while channel surfing, I stopped when I saw a maze on the screen – the overhead shot from The Shining of the garden maze.
In a flash I saw that movie as a metaphor for our civilization. There’s the maze mentioned by Saul, and there’s the Hotel, shining psychic energy on the humans. The Hotel represents History, a looming structure, a legacy, built on the graves of people forgotten and ignored. The Hotel shines violence into the mind of The Man, who goes on a rampage and attacks women and children. Our civilization then is made up of violent minded men who excuse their actions by blaming History, saying, ‘its human nature’ or ‘its their fault because of something they did years ago (i.e. ‘Saddam gassed his people)’. The Buddhists would see a good example of Karma. Your actions past and present wear a new pattern into your life, so that it becomes your future action. And in The Shining, Nicholson is told he was always the caretaker, the photo at the end suggesting a karmic rebirth.
On February 8th’s The Colbert Report Alan Dershowitz suggested that we need to license cartoonists and comics, which I find reprehensible, but not that surprising coming from this apologist for American Empire. It’s clear enough that Dershowitz’s ethical compass has lost its magnetism. He was talking about these stupid cartoon protests. Dershowitz’s offensive comment was followed in turn for a commercial: ‘own the best horror movie of 2005; Saw II’.
Why would you want to? But of course, this all makes sense given how violent our society is: Dershowitz saying we need to license comics, he who has advocated the use of torture ‘in extreme situations’ and goes on to argue the neo-con idea that the war on terrorism will never end – that we’re living in the la-la-land of danger and violence and so no more trips to the candy store, no more right to say offensive things, no more release by making fun of assholes like him. And after this rosy vision of our civilization, where we’ve come after hundreds of years of trying to make life a good thing for all, and being told that we defeated Hitler so that we can all live in freedom and happiness, we can enjoy the freedom to purchase two-hours of fictionalized trauma to enjoy with our significant others, or worse yet, all by ourselves.
And yet, there is The Shining made 26 years ago, to show us our society. Our society where violence is causal while condemned with shallow words. Yet somehow our culture manages to create individuals like Gil Fronsdal (a Buddhist teacher) and John Ralston Saul; individuals not seemingly integrated into the violent aspects of our (North American) society. For that matter, there are people like Richard Simmons.
Somehow our culture manages to create criticism which tries to keep these forces of violence and madness in check. People like Dershowitz obviously don’t see the advantage of this. Licensed cartoonists would not be allowed to express the wildness of human imagination, nor would they be allowed to be critical. We need the outlet in our society to be offensive – it’s what’s keeps us from burning down embassies, and which strengthens our minds so that what we find offensive doesn’t inspire violence despite all the cultural signals which imply that is exactly what we should do.
Valentines! Had fun at party. Movie was great!1 Didn’t see it all of it.2 I think I told D3 off.
_______________________ 1.The movie (as previously mentioned) was The Never Ending Story which we watched on video as part of our Valentine’s day ‘party’ which meant time off of class and probably some sweets. I recall that The Never Ending Story excited both my imagination and touched me emotionally. At the time I had a total crush on the Princess, who I learned via Google is named Tami Stronach and is now a dancer in New York City. Now I look at her image from the time and see nothing more than a child, who was 2 years older than I was, and I find it strange to think I once imagined love based on this kid.
2. School ended before the movie did. We watched the rest at a later date.
3. D was the older brother of one of my classmates, who used to bully me. ‘Telling him off’ only meant that I stood up to him.