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So, according to my sister’s boyfriend, who witnessed it, there was a nude jumper this morning on the DVP. He jumped off one of the overpasses near the BMW facility (either Queen St or Eastern Ave). Of course, they didn’t bother to tell us that on the evening news. Instead, Global gave us a report of increased cycle-cops around schools to intimidate the 16 year old out on bail (whose face was graciously blurred).

Now, I understand that there’s something like at least one suicide a week on the TTC, but they don’t want to make the actual numbers public. It would seem they prefer the accuracy of innuendo and rumour. The same is true for people like this morning’s fellow, who (if successful) chose to leave the earth as buck naked as when he arrived. I’ll credit him with some performance art originality.

But why the silence? Why do news editors everywhere think we should care about the car wrecks and murders? I haven’t been murdered lately, I don’t plan to be anytime soon. But what business is it of yours if I am? The same goes for the car accident. If anything, that’ll be between the insurance companies. I’ll concede it’s everyone’s business inasmuch as it ties up traffic, but beyond that I don’t want or need to know. Isn’t it true that murders are rarely random, but usually are the culmination of some dispute?

We may live in a time when Dr. Phil thinks the whole of the United States and Canada needs to witness the tawdry details of some family’s anguish (today’s episode on incest for christ’s sakes) which completely disregards the reasons for confidentially in the first place.

Let’s be clear here: there are some things of which it is none of our business. I don’t want to know the problems of some abused family, unless I’m in the position of needing to help. But I’m not a priest, a counselor, a psychiatric worker, a bail officer, etc. And if I was, I’d be under strict gag laws. Confidentiality exists as much for the benefit of society as it does for the relevant parties. I for one felt I didn’t need to know the details of Dr. Phil’s incestuous family, and quickly changed the channel in disgust. (For those of you who advertise during his time slot, why not start sending that money to the Red Cross?)

The arrest of the local pedophile, the murder of an abused wife, or the coke habit of the local hoodlum, the grow-op of our neighbors … all this is brought out to be part of the public record. This news is supposed to do what? If anything, it makes us feel less safe, but Toronto remains one of the safest cities in the world, and what crime exists just seems part of life. And given that seems a large portion of this crime is all drug related, it makes me think the only reason we keep our stupid drug laws in place is to ensure the police job security.

Anyway, I for one want to know how many people think Toronto is too awful to live in. I would like to have some understanding of the suicide rate. Because all the regular crime gets reported, I’m able to sit here and think it’s relatively low, compared with other places. I get to formulate what understanding I bring to the issue, and feel rather safe in the metropolis. But I can’t say the same for the depressed, the scared, the anguished, the people who need help but haven’t gotten it, for those for whom society has failed.

I’m reminded of Charles Taylor’s thoughts now. Taylor, a philosopher originally from McGill (and doing the scholar circuit the last few years - he was at U of T a year ago) argues that while the Modernist philosophical tradition begins with Descartes’ introspection, our reality is really one comprised of dialogue. You might think that you are, but Decartes began the line of telling the rest of us. You cannot exist alone. Our lives are comprised of conversations, and even this writing is part of a conversation frozen into our alphabet’s symbols. The comments section below are there for your side, your contribution.

It is because we are social creatures that the news exists - all these reporters on the street talking to some box on someone’s shoulder would be absurd if they didn’t see themselves are part of a larger stream involving the unanimous and anonymous audience. They talk and therefore they are.

And as social creatures, we want to understand our place in society, so we have a tendency to gossip. So the news thinks we might be interested in the painful stories of people who can’t get along, and instead of being useful and warning us that there’s some psycho out there, instead we only get the news after they’ve been arrested (and hence, this is why I don’t really care about this type of news, it always comes after the crimes have been committed in the first place).

But suicides are a death built around the Cartesian model of introspection. I think I’m depressed and therefore I am. I think I can’t go on and therefore I can’t. They represent failures of our society to reach out the necessary hand, to bring someone into a relationship, to involve someone in a dialogue. Murders are crimes of passion, they involve at least two people, one of which is cruel. A suicide is an act of loneliness, involving only one person, whom people in general don’t care enough about. We extend our hard heartedness to not even mentioning their deaths on the news.

Is it because it’s shameful to kill oneself? Is it a left-over from Christianity, when suicides wouldn’t even be given a funeral? Is the TTC’s reluctance to talk about the people who kill themselves on its tracks because they think it’s morbid? The same must be said for the Go Trains, who regularly have ‘accidents’ involving pedestrians. With such a rate of ‘accidents’ that they show, it’s a wonder they haven’t been shut down has a safety hazard.

Morbidity doesn’t usually stop the news - how much more morbid is it to show us pictures of blown up buses in Israel? I clipped a few over the past couple of years, fascinated in that morbid way by the scenes of bodies frozen in death.

And even over the past week, with the catastrophe in New Orleans, the news is showing us anonymous rotting black bodies, which bring a grunt of awfulness from me, but also help me understand just how bad things are down there.

My point here is that the news has no problem feeding morbid curiosity. So why not go that step further and tell us about suicides?

Regarding the argument of selfishness and shame - when Kurt Cobain killed himself, all the fans were like, ‘what an asshole’ and bitched about his selfishness. That always seemed stupid to me. Are you saying then, that your selfishness is such that you’d prefer he stuck around suffering just so that you can go on buying Nirvana CDs? That was my argument at the time.

It’s not shameful to kill oneself. It’s an act of desperation, or if you’re a terrorist, of idiocy. If you’re so past caring about this world to want to live in it, what do you care about shame? And why should we as a society, continue to take their actions personally?

If you’re of the school that it’s a condemnation of our company, then I suppose I can see where you’re coming from, but I’d like to think we’re bigger than denying them identity out of a petty sense of insult. I mean, our world is pretty screwed up, and those that leave it voluntarily are probably saving themselves a lot of grief. But at the same time, I’d like to understand their motivations, their criticisms, in order to help improve the situation.

The news wants us to believe we live in a cruel world, full of crime and the winners of sports where one person or group defeats another in glorious competition. By denying us the reports of the losers, who validate its cruelty, they aren’t allowing us the chance to think about what’s wrong with the picture, and how it could change.

To the naked jumper: rest in peace wherever you are.

image: from Wikipedia

I spent a week in Maine at the end of July, mostly reading fat books but every now and then giving my mind a rest with some channel surfing. The impression I got from my sampling of pure American television was that their reputation for being not to bright seemed well deserved. In that broadcast environment, even PBS looked dopey. I found myself really missing TVO and the CBC.

But, having come to see how great the CBC is, and how important it is to our television recipes, I can’t say I very much care about the current lockout. Because it’s been August, and I see it as part of the vacation - the usual cancon channels on radio and TV are whacked and so what? I can handle it. It’ll be over eventually. In addition, I do have lots of books to read and TV is mostly a waste of time, especially in the summer. I also have a new gig which means I’m not doing my regular home-office hours anymore, with CBC Newsworld on it the kitchen to give me something to listen to - I’m out and about and ignoring daytime TV.

Perhaps I’m just not facing the reality that it could go on and on like that hockey thing. I hear though that it could go on for at least 7 weeks - oh well. I mean, Peter Mansbridge didn’t get to fly to New Orleans to report from the scene, and who really cares? (Wasn’t it kind of disturbing the way all the reporters took the Boxing Day tsunami as an excuse to get out of the frigid continent for a few days … ?) I’ve had CNN on the past couple of days for those hours when I am ‘in the office’ because I have to orient myself to the reality that Louisiana now has more in common with Bangladesh than it does Ontario. Disasters do have a certain fascination and inspire a kind of awe, but it almost seems a good thing that I’m not getting a Canadian perspective on this story.

Anyway, with that nod to current events out of the way, I want to talk about the bigger picture of this CBC dispute. I think I dreamt about it last night, having some conversation about it, where I said that it being a lockout means that the CBC in effect fired their entire staff. In the first week, lots of people joked that the CBC is actually better now than the big egos have been temporarily put out to sidewalk. This sort of division in power - management versus the personalities and support staff, suggests the CBC is a creature with two heads and can function just fine with one. That’s a little disconcerting since it suggests massive and expensive redundancy. But redundancy is a good thing, so that’s not really worth complaining about nor should it be eliminated.

Let’s say this then: we are less than 6 months away from 2006, when we will undoubtedly be living ‘in the future’. The past six years have had a sort of legendary character -first we ‘partied like it was 1999′, than we were living ‘in the year 2000′ and then we re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001′, enjoyed the palindromic character of 2002, and the past three years, (’03, ‘04, ‘05) have still seemed like an extension of the 1990s.

But now, everything is beginning to be different. While the belief amongst marketers is that ‘one should never launch a new product in August’ this past month has laid the foundations for the next ten to twenty years of common perception (at least in Canada) - a time frame which makes up the first quarter of the 21st Century.

The American nightly newscasters are all gone (Rather, Brokaw, Jennings), there’ve now been two natural disasters which remind us of our impotence in the face of natural forces, and Hollywood ain’t what it used to be, as the summer receipts show. Michael Ignatieff has gone from being an esoteric academic to being touted as the next Prime Minister (returning from Harvard to take up a post at U of T) - and if pigs fly in the next five years and that comes to pass, he’ll do so under Governor General Michaelle Jean. And the CBC has had a labour disruption, which threatens the broadcast schedule of new season of an updated version of hockey.

Like the guns of August 1914, it seems easy enough to ignore these developments at the moment, not yet conscious of the bigger picture, but let’s consider the following:

René Lévesque used to be a CBC personality in Quebec in the 1950s, until the 1959 68 day (two month) strike. The fact that the French CBC strike was allowed to go for so long embittered Lévesque toward Ottawa. He later said something to the effect that the English CBC would not have been allowed a two-month strike, and would have been forced to and end much sooner. The lengthy disruption in Quebec, in his opinion, showed how little English-dominated Ottawa cared about what happened in la belle province. And so Levesque went into politics ….

(As it is, only Jack Layton is demanding an immediate return of Parliament, and that’s to deal with this softwood-lumber, death of NAFTA thing. All those anti-globalization protests of the late 90s now seem like so much, ‘we told you so’. Ottawa clearly does not yet care about the CBC. Nor do I as I’ve mentioned do I - I mean, does anybody miss George Stroumboulopoulos’s show? … I can’t even remember what it’s called as I type this. So much for their efforts to win over my demographic).

So, point one - this lockout might have significant consequences. And in one way, it already has, since it’s forced podcasting to a new level. I’m not really on the podcasting bandwagon - I find it all rather pretentious. Everyone faking up a radio-like sounding thing and treating it as this new and great thing, and it’s only a trendy way to talk about an mp3 file, which have been around for what, eight years now?

I guess the difference is that mp3s have tipped past bootleg music because almost everyone in an urban core seems to have a fairly sophisticated computer and a high speed connection (and if they have a job they can afford an iPod to listen to their mp3 collection with).

You have radio stations like 102.1 CFNY The Edge offering Allan Cross’s The Ongoing History of New Music podcasts, and no, they aren’t the archived shows (which would be awesome), but some 1 minute clip, effectively acting as teaser advertising for the radio show. That is not worth a trend. Jumping on a downloading bandwagon and offering your readers/listeners irrelevant shit I find tries my patience - especially since one had to wait for the download to complete before being disappointed.

Via Tod Maffin’s site, cbcunplugged.com, we get to listen to phone messages. Oh boy. Nevertheless, this cat is out of the bag. While the content is rather lame, I’m excited by the fact that the employs have embraced the possibilities of this type of broadcasting. The upcoming CBC Unlocked will be something worth checking out.

It shows creative thinking that the management seems to lack, and it also seems like the type of thing which is allowed to happen because it’s unfiltered by office politics and bureaucracy and the like. Whatever happens at the CBC after this is all over, I hope they bring this back the mother corp.

(Which raises another thing: according to iTunes, the CBC3 podcast is number 1 in terms of popularity. It seems to be unaffected by the labour dispute. Why?)

Last week I listened to a couple of mp3 files from Australian radio of my favorite thinker, Mr. John R. Saul. He was on he tour promoting his globalization book, and he brought up his point that the economics of the past 25 years reminds him of 18th Century mercantilism. And so perhaps it follows that the bloging reminds me of the type of pamphleteering that helped spark the American and French Revolution. In those days, you wrote something, you went to a printer, and it was on the street in an hour. In the two centuries since, the middlemen of editors and marketers filled the offices of the publishing houses until reject letters became a writer’s rite of passage.

In his previous books, Saul likened the explosion of instant publishing in the 18th Century with a trend where a public of common people began trying to make themselves heard over the dominant voice of those in power. Post-modernism, inasmuch as it was the academic expression of trying to express what had remained unexpressed (because it had been put down by a dominant voice, in this case, the Modernist aesthetic and philosophical ideology) is nothing more than the first wave of people expressing themselves to those in power. (Ironic then how pomo has become noxious power itself). First radio and then television gave voice to the whole other segment of society which had been discriminated against by those who thought they were better than average. Jerry Springer’s infamous show isn’t so much a parade of ‘trash’ as it is a reminder of human variety, and especially of the need for adequate social and education programs.

Blogs and podcasting are continuations of this trend. As Saul wrote it, when things get too literary and language becomes too controlled by certain experts (whether post-modernist writers who can’t string a proper sentence together, or the rise in corporate ways of speaking so that every idea becomes inarticulate) there is a backlash, a corresponding balancing rise in the speech of everyday.

Humans are creatures of sound - and it is only with training that we become creatures of print. The rhythms of everyday speech will always seem more natural and be more effective at communicating than any purple prose from some show-off snob.

So I think blogs are great for that since their style is one that lends itself to being written as if it were spoken. I certainly think this way when I write - I’m confident enough in my ability to write well that I see no need to show off and am thankful to avoid the embarrassment of academic writing.

And now that a medium has come along which allows both text and voice files to be easily broadcast - we’re witnessing some kind of media utopia, and I remind you that utopia means ‘no place’ and the internet certainly has no place, and like the universe, having no centre, it is everywhere. Naming his perfect place utopia was a way of Thomas More to say that perfection is impossible, but perhaps that is true only when talking about material, human things, and not immaterial shadows of electricity.

For now we have a medium by which a locked-out staff at a national broadcaster can continue writing and speaking, and we now choose to download it and listen to it when we want. We are no longer forced to wait until their re-broadcast time or pay $20 if we want to hear it again. For one thing it’s shameful that the CBC last year stopped providing mp3 files of their shows; let’s hope this populism amongst their worker bees will break their outdated media models once and for all once everything gets back to normal.

And so, the last four months of the mid-decade year will be interesting times, as we watch a new status quo begin to develop. While the CBC lockout seems insignificant, it is part of a bigger picture that includes new hockey, new politics, new ways of speaking and listening to the masses, and new disasters that remind us of bigger pictures and long-term consequences. Whether or not the egos at the CBC return to their soapboxes anytime soon, our lives are way more interesting going into this autumn than they were a year ago. Hollywood may be complaining about a summer slump, and no wonder. It’s far more entertaining and engaging to simply pay attention to events.

It’s been a while since I posted … been a busy summer and such. And my art grumpiness has reached the level of ‘why bother?’ and so I’ve avoided a lot of shows in favour of reading biographies of Goethe. But on Friday night, I went out to the opening at Zsa Zsa, since it was the last show there ever.

After seven years, Andrew Harwood is giving up his gallery and moving out of the back. Zsa Zsa has been both a home and a business, but the business side never dominated his commitment to giving people an opportunity to show. In the past, he’s advertised the gallery as showing ‘the best and the worst of Toronto’ which brought a laugh out of me, since my show there in February of 2003 followed what I thought was something abysmal. As a rental gallery, Zsa Zsa was one of those open venues by which people could seek immediate reaction and criticism from an audience - and if anything sold, Andrew didn’t take a cut.

Harwood took over the space from Myfanwy Ashmore, Shannon Cochrane, and Keith Manship who pre-Zsa Zsa called the space the In/Attendant Gallery. Now, with Harwood’s departure, Paul Petro is taking over the space and so-far is planning on using it to exhibit some of his multiple collection.

For the final month, Andrew put together a couple of shows, the first of which opened on August 5th, and was dedicated to the theme of pot. I was away for that one but I heard it was quite a party, with 300+ people showing up. The second show opened last Friday night, dedicated to magic, or as Harwood wrote in his PR: ‘[it] is a simple show that celebrates the sweet magic of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. This show lauds those folks and that place. Sweetness, magic and light’. Featuring Christina Zeidler, R.M. Vaughan, Will Munro, Maryanne Barkhouse, Fastwürms, Allyson Mitchell, Michael Belmore and Andrew Harwood, Bedknobs & Broomsticks is a nice little show which seemed to open on the right day - with that days thunderstorms reeking havoc across the city, the magic and withcraftery fit right in.

Now, there’s something going on in this city with regard to knitted wool. And in the way that strands of wool can come together to form a blanket or a sweater via a network, there is a network of relationships operating on those two blocks and expressing itself in the material of which sweaters are made of.

Andrew is one of Paul Petro’s artists, as are Will Munro, Allyson Mitchell, and Fastwurms. So it makes since that these artists are in this final show, as much as it does that it is Petro who is taking over the space. In as much as the artist community of Toronto is fractal - that is, divided up into ever smaller communities until only power couples and those with an overdose of self-esteem are left - the community in which Harwood finds himself is one that has been actively working out an ‘afghan aesthetic’ over the past couple of years. Allyson Mitchell and Will Munro have both used appropriated afghan blankets in their recent work, and while Cecilia Berkovic is not one of Petro’s artists, she has brought this to her work with Instant Coffee and especially to the room she designed for the Gladstone Hotel (viewable here).

Allyson Mitchell’s piece in this show is one of her collaged images based on shag carpeting, in this case that of a sasquatch terrorizing something. My conversation with her that night got into my recent trip to my hometown in Nova Scotia. I was telling her about how one of my friends there had a stuffed bear head on his wall, and from there we talked about taxidermy, as her piece uses taxidermy glass eyes and a bear nose.

Will Munro has a wonderful piece which I really liked, consisting of four axes tied together with loops of coloured yarn, using a 70s colour scheme of orange and brown. While axes are supposed to be dangerous objects, their shiny newness and their interaction with the yarn make this piece seem pleasurable and safe. This wool based aesthetic I find really comforting in a way, and given that it’s presence in this show follows the show dedicated to pot, I’m reminded of what someone once told me about what it feels like to be high - ‘you know when you’re a kid and you get up early on a Sunday morning, and it’s chilly, and you come downstairs and wrap yourself in an nice blanket, and how cozy that is? That’s what it feels like to be high’. Yes, comfort and coziness are as associated in my mind with afghan blankets as they were in my stoner friend’s, and thus I welcome this development in the Toronto scene, and it’s reflection in this last show at a gallery which helped foster it’s development through friendships.

But not all the pieces reflect the afghan school. The space is dominated by Maryanne Barkhouse’s piece, which many people thought was a dance floor, and asked if they could step on it. Consisting of a grid of images within a metal frame, and standing up about 6 inches from the floor, the images tell a beaver’s story.

RM Vaughan’s video continues in his theme (present at least in his video works) of self-disappointment. This time, he’s speaking of his belief that 40 year old gay men do not have mid-life crisis’s - rather, they go on tourist vacations, to tourist landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. Richard is best known as a writer, and as such his monologue, playing through the headphones attached to the monitor, is worth listening to - which I write since so often I at least would rather not put headphones on to watch a video.

The window is dominated by the work of the Fastwürms - mushrooms and fake cakes, it is one of the most ‘magical’ pieces of all. The Wurms (which I’m supposed to write FASTWÜRMS -all caps with an umlaut) work consists of what they have called at various times ‘witch drag’ and so this piece and some of the others in the show fit in with this stream of work. While I don’t share the FASTWÜRMS’ love of witchcraft and magic, I do appreciate there work an awful lot, since they’re an example that something finely made and considered is always more interesting than some kind of crap that tries to get away with the heroics of ‘I can do that with my eyes closed’ sloppiness which artists glorify with the term ‘loose’. While virtuosity has its place, so does craftsmanship, and Fastwürms’ finely made things are force me to pay attention to take what they’re doing seriously.

Anyway, this last ever show closes to walk-ins on the 28th, but can be still seen by appointment until the 30th (which would require a phone call to 416-537-3814).

Bedknobs & Broomsticks
Until August 30th at
Zsa Zsa Gallery
962 Queen Street West

I still think it’s safe to ride the subway.

I’m tempted to say ‘get a grip’ but it seems that the only people freaking out about the potential for terrorism in Canada, and in Toronto for that matter, are the news editors at the traditional outlets. I mean, remember a week ago, under these sweltering blue skies, when talk was on how crappy the Live 8 was and how the biggest threat to Canada was Karla Homolka, that psychopathic windbag who threatened to blow and blow and blow until our whole civil society came crashing down?

And then, Thursday morning, in London England, some bombs go off. Suddenly, Canada’s provincial sense of inferiority is nowhere to be found. Suddenly, all of our insecurities about not being able to play with the big boys are gone, because ‘oh my god, we’re next!’

Now, all we need is one or more nut-jobs to render what I’m saying here obsolete fast. But let’s not be superstitious about it. Let’s not think that just because I’m saying it ain’t gonna happen here means I’m jinxing it or something else. Granted, we should be vigilant. Granted, we certainly hope it won’t happen here. But I want to say this. I don’t think it’s going to happen here.

I say this with a sense of self-confidence, me, a pipsqueak citizen. The same self-confidence that our Ministers seem to lack in order to reassure the public. The same sense of self-confidence I use whenever I drive onto the 401. Sure, I could get killed, but why today? I know what I’m doing and I have to assume the other driving along do as well.

It would seem that our leadership doesn’t know what it’s doing. Let’s go over some points.

1. Ann McLellan sucks
I think back to October 2001 when suddenly she was the Iron Lady who was going to clamp down on our civil liberties and make sure that Canada wasn’t the so called terrorist haven that CBC documentaries would make it seem to be. Now she’s saying Canadians aren’t psychologically prepared for terrorism, which is a big help. Wonderful leadership. And what, pray tell, would be evidence that we are ready? And, with our history of bloodshed, why the hell should we be?

I’ll tell you about my psychological preparation for terrorism: after Sept 11, ‘life is short’ entered my vocabulary. Further, I developed an impatience described as ‘life is too short to put up with this bullshit’. Who wants to go to work one morning unprepared to become a skydiver and think of all the time we wasted listening to know-nothings and bastards? We all deserve better than the mediocre crap we are asked to put up with, and we deserve better than a Public Safety Minister like Ms. McLellan.

Prior to 9/11, I was dealing with a bout of hypochondria. Worried about this ache and that itch, suddenly the prospect of not seeing the end of a day that began with stupid anxiety was brought to my attention on repeat and with colourful graphics and passionate voiceovers. I learned on that day that one could go at any time, and I, in my practically atheistic way, said, ‘My life is in God’s hands’. We only have so much control over our lives, and let’s focus on what we can manage, and if our fate is to die because some jerk is trying to prove a point then well, what can you do?

2. John Bull’s Eye
London England - 2000 years old, long history of violence. Mobs there used to cart heads around on the end of pikes, but we’ve forgotten that. The news keeps talking about the Blitz, and something about the IRA (remember them)? London, England, home of the British Empire, which has been condemned by every politically correct academic for the past 40 years. London, where, in the months since September 2001, we have regular reports talking of terrorist drills, broken up rings, arrests made, and incidents quashed. Home to 7.5 million people. That’s a full 1/4th of Canada’s population right there. (All of Canada = 4 Londons).

Now, I raise this to say, of all the places in the world, after New York, it makes sense for bombs to go off in London.

History of violence and terrorism on a scale of 1 to 10: 10.
History of violence and terrorism in Toronto:1
(I’ll give it a 1 since there’s at least one shooting every weekend, and I don’t think we’ve had mob violence since the 1830s.)

3. Al Qaeda is a Phantom Menace
The best explanation of what’s happened over the past 4 years I’ve encountered has been Adam Curtis’s, The Power of Nightmares. This was broadcast on CBC Newsworld last spring, and was available on the Internet. The video has been take offline, but here you find a transcript of the episode I’m talking about. Now, The Power of Nightmares is a pretty straightforward account of the rise of both fundamentalist thinking in the States (in terms of the Religious Right, and the Neo-Con hawks) and of the Mid East. And here, we are told that Al Qaeda (essentially) doesn’t really exist. The story goes that in the aftermath of the 1998 Kenyan bombings, when the United States put one of the people they caught on trial in New York, they wanted to try Bin Laden in absentia. To do this, they needed to be able to claim/prove that he was part of an organized crime ring - these laws were developed to fight the Mafia. So, they get this fellow to tell a story about something called Al Qaeda, which is Arabic for ‘the Base’. Here, I might as well quote it:

“JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, AL QAEDA During the investigation of the 1998 bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who is a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the early 90s, who has been passed around a whole series of Middle East secret services, none of whom want much to do with him, and who ends up in America and is taken on by-uh-the American government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and is given a huge amount of American taxpayers’ money at the same time. And his account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The picture that the FBI want to build up is one that will fit the existing laws that they will have to use to prosecute those responsible for the bombing. Now, those laws were drawn up to counteract organised crime: the Mafia, drugs crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation is extremely important. You have to have an organisation to get a prosecution. And you have al-Fadl and a number of other witness, a number of other sources, who are happy to feed into this. You’ve got material that, looked at in a certain way, can be seen to show this organisation’s existence. You put the two together and you get what is the first bin Laden myth - the first Al Qaeda myth. And because it’s one of the first, it’s extremely influential.”

The idea of global network of sleeper cells financed by Bin Laden is built up in the days after 9/11 by the NeoCons who want more money for the military-industrial complex. One of the main theses in The Power of Nightmares was that the core of NeoCons - Wolfowitz, Rummy, and the two Dicks (Cheney and Perle) had a long history of over-demonizing America’s enemy - whether it be USSR, or Ayatollah Khomeini (which lead to their support to Saddam Hussein in the 80s), to Saddam himself, and finally, prior to Bin Laden, Bill Clinton.

An arms race of nuclear weapons or a blow job - it was all the same to those jerks cause it got play on CNN and created an anti-Liberal culture unified by a common threat.

Al Qaeda then, would seem to be an elaborate fantasy. And perhaps this knowledge is worth spreading around. Funny though how traditional media haven’t really gotten into it.

The point I want to make here though is that when our city is marred, as it is from time to time, by hate graffiti against whatever ethnic group, CBC isn’t blaming it on an elaborate network of the Aryan Brotherhood. No, we assume it’s a bunch of punks. A bunch of local grown assholes, perhaps inspired by some underground hate-lit or vid. I’m thinking terrorism is working the same way today. Bin Laden might be the hate-pamphleteer, the author of the video Mein Kamp’s that supposedly make the rounds from mosque to mosque, attracting young romantic Islamists to training camps. But we’re dealing with a bunch of independent groups I think, local grown assholes. (And it should be pointed out that we aren’t even sure that Islamists were behind it yet).

London, apparently, had them. Does Toronto? That’s the question. If they do, then…

4. CSIS is incompetent?
John Ralston Saul’s anger toward the word ‘inevitable’ when used by economists and politicians to describe ‘globalizing forces’ over the past 30 years has sharpened me to being angry with the likes of McLellan and all these other so called experts. For them to sit there, on TV, and say, ‘oh, it’s gonna happen here …’ is an admittance of incompetence. It’s like they’re saying, ‘yeah, there are terrorist cells in Canada, we know that, and yeah, they’re probably planning something, but we can’t do anything about it.’ Are they still investigating Jadhi Singh I suppose? Going after the Raging Granies? Or, are they just covering their do-nothing asses by saying it’ll happen here in case something actually does and they were too busy eating donuts?

Basically, scare mongering isn’t going to help anyone. Further, I don’t see why Canada could be seriously considered a target for someone like Bin Laden. For impressionable young bastards from Markham …. who knows? But they’d have to build their bombs first, which would involve the procurement of materials and probably the access of certain websites. CTV and CBC would still rather tell us about the arrests of the local kiddie porn pervert than report such news. What does CSIS know? What aren’t we being told? But is it possible that in effect, there is nothing really to tell?

5. Vigilance
‘Report anything suspicious’. Right. One time I was on the Go Train and there was what I thought a suspicious package there. This was last winter or something. I have to parse this in light of all the paranoia. I think, ‘do I really want to bring the entire Go System to a complete stop just because some careless person forgot something?’ I decided to switch cars. I watched a Go employee walk right past it.

2nd story - CBC reports that VIA rail is investigating a security breach after a CBC employee boarded a train, entered the baggage area, and wasn’t checked for a ticket. I remember in 1995, riding from Moncton to Halifax, and talking with a girl who was careful to not run into the employees cause she was riding without a ticket. She made it sound bohemian and romantic. And I bring that up to say - I bet people ride VIA all the time without tickets. Perhaps this is Canada’s dirty little secret. Do you know someone who freeloaded a VIA ride?

And while we’re on the subject, I’ll bring up that I hate this type of reporter vigilantism. Remember how the Globe and Mail’s Jan Wong, in the months after 9/11, boarded a plane with what was then contraband - box cutter or the like? And then she writes about it as if things are so awful. The same woman who once spent an hour and half looking for kiddie porn in order to prove that it takes that long to find? Why aren’t these people arrested? If I was recruiting terrorists, I’d consider seducing reporters. It would seem a Press Pass is more valuable than a security clearance badge at the airport. You can get away with anything!

Reporter antics do not prove that security is lax. It might prove that these people, whose pictures often accompany their articles, or are seen on tv, are in effect ‘known’ by security. Jan Wong for example - shows up at the airport, has a knife in her purse, and is waived through because it’s known that she’s a just a reporter, and the thought is, ‘why would she do anything?’

The problem with vigilance, when talking about transportation systems, or in whatever other context, is that people are going to be preoccupied with what to them will be significant concerns. ‘I just want to get home,’ ‘I have to make this appointment’. ‘I don’t want to cause a scene…’

Do you remember the fellow in an American airport, who was seen running down an up-escalator? This was in November 2001. Anyway, because he ran down an escalator that was going up, because he was running late, he freaked out security, caused a scene, shut down the airport, and was arrested. He went to jail.

So, you shut down the subway system, inconvenience thousands including yourself, because someone forgot their umbrella, you won’t be called a hero, or congratulated for being vigilant in an era of paranoia. You’ll be vilified.

Now, I’m not saying this to discourage vigilance, or to say it doesn’t matter - I am though, simply trying to articulate what I think most of us would think when considering to hit the alarm strip. The TTC and Go Transit needs to do more to reassure us that we are allowed to do so because otherwise, ‘misuse can lead to fine or imprisonment’.

End the mixed messages and the scarmongering please. And I’ll see you on the subway.

I’ll make this short for once, because there’s not a lot to say beyond this: if you want to check out a year’s worth of Queen West shows in one weekend, make your way over to City Hall between Friday and Sunday to see all the art-stars and wannabes on display. I always find the stuff the art students are doing (who tend to be relegated to their own marginal section) to be worth checking out. Here’s the PR:

——————–

Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition
July 8, 9, 10, 2005

Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto City Hall
Free Admission * Rain or Shine
Hours: July 8, 10am-8pm; July 9, 10am-7pm; and July 10, 10am-6pm.

Find paintings, drawings, sculptures, fibre works, jewelry, watercolours, metal works, original prints, ceramics, glass, wood works, mixed media works, and photographs by 530 artists and craftspeople!

Preview the artists’ work at www.torontooutdoorart.org

Win a $500 Art Shopping Spree! Tickets are $5 each. Buy them at the TOAE office or at the Main Information Booth at Nathan Phillips Square during the show.

For more information: 416.408.2754 or toae@torontooutdoorart.org

img: Scott Waters, Domestic: Cardinal, 2004, oil on wallpaper

Earlier this week I posted an email interview with Matt Crookshank, who is showing with Lisa Pereira at Gallery 61 until July 3. This is the interview with her I mentioned would be upcoming. I first met Lisa two years ago, the same night that Andrew Harwood asked me to be part of the Michael Jackson show that he curated with Lex Vaughan and which got a lot of press. In almost every review - which seemed to be in every paper - Lisa’s video was mentioned, which was a surprising accomplishment for someone who at the time had told me wasn’t sure if she’d flunked out of OCAD or not. (In the end she did have to take a year off due to academic probation, and is due to graduate next year).

Lisa’s video consists of porn culled from various sources and as I describe below, a sampling of different perversions and fetishes. The most amazing thing about it for me was that I learned that it is possible for someone to fuck themselves.

Here’s her PR:

12 Signs of the Apocalypse Lisa Pereira 2005
This video provides 12 Zodialogical pearls of wisdom and is the Kama
Sutra of the 21st century (and not as boring). Like a diver finding
a filthy oyster at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant, this video
will certainly pay off in the long run (whatever that means).

And given that we have Google Ads running on this site, I think I should mention that whatever twisted links come up via the keywords in this post are to be followed at your own risk.

——————

Your video piece, described as a Kama Sutra for the 21st Century, really seems to be a exploration of what most people call perverse. Indeed, many people didn’t want to watch your video twice, although I question what kind of wild stuff they might have on their hardrives. Do you think that the reluctance to watch your video more than once has more to do with not wanting to experience perversion in public, amongst others, or because they were really turned off and disgusted?

With regards to why people may only watch my video once I can only suggest the following two scenarios:

1.) People don’t really watch the same thing twice (particularly video art which is often difficult enough the first time around).

2.) People feel compelled to mimic disgust in front of each other, lest the public assume that they are familiar with, or even enjoy, the particular sex acts described in the video.

I don’t think the material in the video is disgusting nor do I care whether people think I participate in the activities illustrated. They probably think I do, because a lot of people have asked me which sign I am. For the record I’m a Leo, the fisting sign.

And, I’m sure there will be some people who might be turned on by some of the footage and feel the need to have a jerk off about it later on and I think that’s swell.

The found footage in the video is stuff I downloaded off the internet. Anyone with access to a computer has access to the same images. The things I shot myself are so over-the-top and unbelievable that it’s more funny (I hope) then disgusting.

Your cynical approach comes off as an intelligent response rather than just being a wanker, which is a fine balancing act that you pull off well. I find myself amused by your work rather than annoyed. But I wonder, would you ever see yourself making bourgeois-beauty Sarah-McLachlan-like videos featuring flowers and fairies? Or are you committed to exposing the sick underbelly of society forever?

I don’t like Sarah McLachlan or the kind of lame aesthetic her music videos ape, but if I were offered some cash, would I make that kind of work? You bet.

I wouldn’t necessarily be good at it but if the price were right why not? I would take that money and put it into the stuff that I really wanted to make. Better me then some other lame director who’s gonna take that kind of shit seriously and then make some horrible ‘art film’ that I will undoubtedly have to sit through at an equally boring film festival.

And if you knew some of the jobs I’ve had, in the grand scheme of things, making bad music videos would be one of the least evil things I’ve had to do. Who knows, maybe there’s some way I could slip in a few subliminal messages. Like those Coke machines with naked ladies on them.

Anyway, people who work on Canadian music videos get paid in peanuts, probably in Sara McLachlan’s case I’d get paid in free maxis, those horrible pillow-like ones you get at the dollar store so I’d probably say no fucking way you stupid, stupid bitch.

Do you consider it sick at all?

There are sicker things out there. During the making of that video I watched a lot of shit eating. And I’m not talking about a nibble on some cute little poodle poo in Pink Flamingos, I’m talking about squatting over some girl’s mouth and emptying your bowels into her eager craw. And I couldn’t put it in the video. Not because it was revolting (which it was) but because I just couldn’t make it funny. I’m not trying to shock people and gross them out. I’m just interested in people’s sick and disgusting turn-ons.

I can see why a lot of those things might be sexy to someone even though they don’t directly turn me on. I don’t think sex shocks people anymore. Shit eating is sick but it’s kind of funny to think about. It’s unpleasant for me and maybe other people because I don’t find anything sexy about it but obviously someone does because there is no shortage of shit sex sites on the internet and elsewhere so someone’s paying for this stuff and it isn’t just perverts like me (besides, I found a all of it for free). Faking it was way funnier then actually seeing it.

You’ve made other work that seems to explore perversion - notably your vampire video featuring the liver. Why are you interested in the degradations of sex (as opposed to celebrating it or whatever else one might do?)

The vampire film was actually a cannibal film called Lesbian Cannibal (get it? she “eats” her out). There are already a lot of crappy Hollywood movies that celebrate love and sex and romance and all that stuff. Crappier still are the Hollywood movies that are supposed to be titillating and controversial but don’t discuss sex in a way that people do all the time.

Also, if one wants to jerk off, there are a variety of websites and video and magazine stores to provide you with countless hours of beat-off material. That video was about having casual sex in the midst of post-aids tension, where a single encounter could potentially kill you, but then I didn’t want to make some tragic piece about living with aids.

Matching up perversions with the signs of the zodiac was a really good idea. Was it inspired by something real? Like, where you ever involved with a nasty Pisces?

The use of the zodiac is actually based on a record called Blowfly Zodiac. For each Zodialogical sign Blowfly rearranges classic soul tracks so that they are very sexually explicit and funny. It’s a sweet little record. I don’t know anything about astrology but I liked the idea of making arbitrary connections to each sign according to some weird sex thing I was thinking about. For a mix tape of Blowfly email me at lisa@sisboombah.ca

Tim what sign are you?

I’m Aquarius

—————————

Diamonds in the Ruff continues at Gallery 61 (61 Ossington Ave) until July 3. Gallery hours: fri 7-10pm, sat 1-6pm or by appointment.

Image from the invite

Matt Crookshank currently has a show on right now with Lisa Pereira (interview with her to come) at Gallery 61, entitled, Diamonds in the Ruff and which runs until July 3. It is easily some of the most unique work out there at the moment, and so I sent Matt some questions.

Before we begin, here’s the PR Matt sent out last week in preparation for the last Friday’s opening:

“5 Chimera Love Paintings Matt Crookshank 2005
Chimera Love, so addicting. Love Bites! Like Pandora’s Box, the
devil in Miss Jones, these dirty slut paintings are prepared for you,
but are you prepared for them? Drenched in sin, decadence and
debauchery, they are the best kind of poison. Drink and be
imprisoned in the cage with golden bars.”

“Shade 1-3 revisited Matt Crookshank 2005
A shade is the insubstantial remains of the dead, a phantom without a
body or the power of thought. When hung together, these paintings
create a temporary window through which one can view Hades without
having to actually stay there for eternity.”
One of the viewers said that the circles looked like old used condoms. When I asked you about it, you said that to you they were like pockets of energy emerging between the branes of the multiverse of String Theory. Do you think this reflects some kind of fractal of reality, as a dried condom is in a way, a pocket of (captured) energy?

And, was she right-on, considering these were the Chimera love, ‘dirty slut’ paintings? (weren’t they?)

I loved her association to dirty condoms. I’m definitely interested in skins, and membranes, and fluidity in between structures. I find all of that rather sensual, and somehow almost ’sinful’. There’s something so decadent about tubing out entire tubes of paint onto your canvas. It’s gratuitous. And when the varnish breaks through the tubed dikes, and slides all over the canvas against my will… oh my god…

You’ve told me in the past that this style of yours, with circles and squiggles are inspired by String Theory, are these:
a) concrete representations of something abstract,
b) concrete representations of a concrete reality,
c) abstract representations of a concrete reality,
d) abstract representations of an abstract reality?

e) None of the above. My paintings are not representations of anything. They are something. Certainly there are ideas in them from String Theory, and from other sources. But they are not illustrations of String Theory. They are cohesive and total power magic spells and they are designed to effect people and create changes.

I want you to talk about the ‘failure’ stuff, and this whole thing about being disgusting. I don’t really see the paintings as particularly gross - I see an interplay between materials, but they aren’t what we’d easily call beautiful. One pocket of yellow and red reminded people of a pussy sore, as if that’s the only thing that red and yellow can suggest. What’s going into your colour choices? Are the red and yellow here not related to fire, to being a window into Hades/Hell?

It depends on how you define ‘disgusting’. I think something that is gratuitous is often disgusting. Too much of something becomes gross. Do you ever have a moment when you get too turned on maybe? Or too titillated? Too aroused? And then it all comes crashing down cause it’s too much. When there’s been too much suspense and the illusion breaks. I love that line, that moment when it goes from beauty to horror. I like to make my paintings play that line.

As far as colours being representations of fire, no. My colour choices generally just pop into my head when I look at a canvas. It just says ‘I need some red’ or whatever. My paintings aren’t representations of anything, not in the way that they’re painted anyway. And they’re also not symbolic - I loathe symbolism. So speak and say. Yuck.

My paintings are magic spells. I know that sounds sort of simple, like I’m some kind of village idiot, but it’s true.

I love abstract paintings because you can allow them to become these organic systems, and before you know it they’ve gotten away from you and taken on a life of their own. They each have their own energy, and they are meant to make people change. When I write about my paintings raising hell, or creating world peace, or starting revolution, of course that’s all tongue in cheek. I know that my paintings probably won’t do any of those things. I can’t be totally sure of it, and I certainly am thinking and dreaming rather seriously about those kinds of ideas while I paint, but I’m aware that most of the time they will fail in my more grandiose magic casting intentions.

But this general idea, that a painting can make something tangible happen, that I have seen with my own eyes. I know how paintings can change people, and how they can open minds. There is a very real energy in painting, and it translates to the viewer. You can make someone change, you can affect their mind, and you can create all kinds of effects. Right now, I might not be causing reckless debauchery and dementia through my paintings, but one day! Just you wait.

Obviously chance is playing a part of the process, so I wonder how much you try to control, and if you do any editing after the fact, in case it didn’t turn out like you hoped.

How can you edit poured varnish? It does whatever it wants. The other elements in my paintings are extremely controlled. The painted lines are details of sketches or strokes with my computer mouse. Sometimes I lay out compositions in Photoshop. I build a very strict structure, a foundation, for the varnish to flirt with. Once I lay the varnish, I’m introducing the liquid, the fuel, and the fluid that works inside the structure. It’s the contrast of these two simple things that really lets the paintings take off. I love the varnish because from then on, the paintings pretty much paint themselves. It’s not ‘my free subconscious expression’ and it’s not something I compose and control. It’s actually something entirely random. Of course I mix in whatever colours I want, but this varnish is so unpredictable, even after 5 years using it I can’t know what it will do.

Let’s talk about abstraction. What do you enjoy about it?

Abstract painting is the most difficult thing to do well. It is so easy to make terrible abstract paintings, but it is so very hard to make extremely powerful and overwhelming abstract art.

I love that abstract painting is such a degraded art form. It went from the highest of high art with abstract expressionism, to (what it seems to be now in Toronto) the most reviled and abhorred practice. Especially from the context of a straight white male. How predictable!

Of course, the rest of the world is way ahead of Toronto on this. Abstraction is so exciting right now. There is so much innovation, and it’s really able to capture and translate the complex myriad structures we now live in so effectively. In Toronto though, it seems like people are still stuck in the 90s, still so embarrassed by abstract painting.

Still, people just don’t seem to know how to deal with it. They keep looking for a way to ‘read’ it, to force a narrative. Whether that’s the tired narrative of formalism, or the cliché of pure expression. So many people seem so at a loss. It’s so much easier to look at badly drawn cartoon art, which is a blight upon Toronto right now.

When will that shit die and go away?? If I were to draw or paint cartoons, I’d become a graphic novelist. That’s something you can respect! But how can anyone respect an artist’s stoner sketches, pinned up on a wall? A narrative no deeper than loose nostalgic empathy, maybe with a bit of irony and sarcasm thrown in. Barf.

Abstract painting is fucking HARD. It challenges me. Once you’ve really allowed a painting to come to life, and it starts to tell you what do paint next, that’s when you’ve really gotten somewhere. You’re out of your own head, and you’re into some kind of new territory where you’re forced to respond and be inventive and problem-solve. I had a fantasy once of curating an abstract art show, and forcing all these conceptual artists, and cartoon drawers, and realist painters and photographers to make abstract paintings. Because it is, to my mind, so much more of a challenge than other art practices.

I know I’m sounding totally pretentious right now, but really think about it? There’s nothing else to grab a hold of. No narrative, no figure, no ground, no concept. You have to make the painting speak on its own. And I’m not talking ‘art for art’s sake’ here. I mean you have to make it really talk to people, to make them change. I’ve seen it with so many people, getting excited and turned on in front of my paintings. High is the new low.

Abstract painting is the most difficult of all art forms to perfect. It’s like poetry. Listening to most poetry is like living a nightmare. But every now and then someone is so good, that it makes you forget about every shitty bad piece of poetry you’ve ever read or heard in you life. Abstract painting is the same way. It’s terrible - 99% of it is terrible. Because it’s so HARD. So much art I see my peers in Toronto making right now, it’s so easy to produce. It’s a quick idea. A one off joke. No commitment. It can be very quirky and fun, certainly. But I don’t know how that can be fulfilling. There’s no daring, no chance, no allowing for chaos and then dealing with what comes next.

————————–

Diamonds in the Ruff continues at Gallery 61 (61 Ossington Ave) until July 3. Gallery hours: fri 7-10pm, sat 1-6pm or by appointment

Matt is also currently showing at Solo Exhibition (Barr Gilmore’s storefront window space) at 787 Queen West. That piece is called Chimera Cesspool (of Sin) which consists of oil and varnish on glass. Solo Exhibition runs from one full moon to the next, and so that show ends on July 20 (the day they landed on the moon!)

Images from Matt’s website, www.mattcrookshank.com

So, like I mentioned in my last posting, I was at the MOCCA opening last week. I wasn’t planning to go, really - I planned on going to the latest show at YYZ, but a friend told me about the MOCCA party where she was going so we made plans to meet there. I arrived early, after checking out the show at 401 Richmond, and then my friend showed up, but she got into interesting conversations with other people, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I wandered around introducing myself to other people for kicks (which I guess is a way to say that the art didn’t hold my attention). But I guess it never really does for very long, especially at openings, and especially at openings in the summer which also consider themselves parties. ‘Seen one, seen ‘em all’ I’ve been known to say, and the thing is that’s not really unfair since artists are so invested in the idea of a series. Perhaps I’ve opened myself up to the criticism that I don’t know what I’m doing - writing about art and all - but I tend to think it’s a skill acquired from the channel surfing culture. New technologies introduce new skill sets and exploit unknown talents, n’est-ce-pas?

So, in MOCCA, taking up the main exhibition space, are a bunch of drums. Drums as sculpture, drums in videos, mechanized-robotized drums. I’m sure there’s lost here to appreciate if you like music and drums, but since I’m not passionate about either, I don’t really have anything to say. Some people like Crest, I like Colgate; this is Crest art to me. That’s all.

I suppose I should learn my lesson from my last posting and bitch about it, which would raise some ire and get everyone out to see what all the fuss is about. All I can say is that I’m still figuring out this whole art-criticism thing, which doesn’t even matter anyway since people are quite capable of making up their own minds. I guess when I started this gig I figured I’d try to weigh in with my two cents now and then, encourage people to see this and check out that, give them some ins to the scene. So, with that in mind, I’m saying: there’s a new show at MOCCA. It’s next door to a show at Edward Day which is going to have more visitors now than it would have had otherwise because I said that show was boring. Well, I find the drum show at MOCCA boring too, but for different reasons: cuz it ain’t my cup of tea is all. That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been exhibited in the first place, it’s just to say that I’m a nerd who doesn’t like the whole indie-music convergence with fine art thing, but that’s just me. It’s workin’ for everyone else. So be it.

This drum thing is called Demons stole my soul: rock n’ roll drums in contemporary art. Rock on.

The show I did appreciate at MOCCA is in the backroom, featuring Karma Clarke-Davis, Edith Dakovic, Nicholas Di Genova, Istvan Kantor, Geoffrey Pugen, Floria Sigismondi.

I like Di Genova’s pieces; I curated him into the YYZ zine last January, where he worked with that document’s newsprint to publish nice black and white drawings. Here, he’s showing large images drawn on mylar using animation ink, to give the colours a nice matte effect. I think I’m struck by his pictures because they have this relationship to Japanese animé which I spent my childhood adoring, as did many of us. Animé holds my interest because of the combination of striking rendering, unique stylization, and usually a philosophical underpinning to the story line. By tapping into these associations, Di Genova is able to produce work that holds my interest beyond my usual cursory glance.

In the same room is a video I didn’t watch by Geoffrey Pugen. Or I should say I watched it but didn’t put the headphones on to hear the soundtrack, mostly because the two available were almost always in use. Next to that is one of Istvan Kantor’s machine-sex-action videos … the point of which I always find is lost because I’m distracted by the fact that I know the people writhing around and I’m thinking ’so-and-so has a nice body’. I think it’s all supposed to be about dehumanization, and machines, and porn, but it comes across as a fetish video of all three, with acting worse than what you usually get in a porn video. But hey, he’s famous now so who cares right? Nowadays, it’s like you’re not a real curator if you don’t take Kantor seriously, so throw him in with the kids.

Sigismondi is another one of these famous people who’s shown with the MOCCA before, when it was up in North York, and she’s got a mannequin with horn legs if I remember correctly. The show is called Hybrids, and so it makes sense under this curatorial theme of what Robert Storr would associate as grotesque. I suppose this is a polite Canadian version, extremely understated, of what he was getting at last year with his SITE Santa Fe show: artists mash things up, come and check it out how weird it all is.

Edith Dakovic has the most repellent pieces, to my Colgate mind, consisting of sphere coated with the type of silicon used to simulate skin in special effects. Little hairs here and there, and moles cover it’s healthy Caucasian surface, the illusion eliciting the reaction of it being some form of life, some deformed animal grown in the lab for organ harvesting and the usual nightmare scenario.

Karma’s video must have been between loops because I didn’t see it and don’t know what it’s about.

Ok, to summarize then: what awaits you when you cross the parking lot, currently marked by that gorgeous installation of blue tree stalks, is Edward Day on your left, who’s showing boring realist work and other stuff that didn’t catch my attention; straight-ahead in MOCCA, you’ll find a floor full of drums cast in bronze or whatever, some of them done up with robotics, along with videos and other things; in the back room at MOCCA, a show called Hybrids which is the only thing that caught my interest. There’s probably something else which I’m forgetting, but hey, I was socializing that evening, not looking for the god of the art religion.

More info: MOCCA website (which is in desperate need of redesign).

I was at the MOCCA opening the other night (more on that later) and while there checked out the Dan Hughes show at Edward Day next door. To be absolutely honest, I was looking at the paintings while in the middle of introducing myself to a girl who turned out to be a painting student at OCAD, so we talked about it from the perspective of both being familiar with the medium. At one point I said, ‘these are too 17th Century for me,’ referring to their dark colour schemes. And I bring that up only to say straight away that the paintings weren’t absorbing 100% of my attention.

I’ve recently begun to paint again after not taking it that seriously over the past few years, and I’ve been going after this New Old Mastercism that Donald Kuspit began talking about 6 years ago. Dan Hughes’s show is just down the street from Mike Bayne’s, which just closed at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery, which I wrote about here and which mentioned Kuspit’s defence of superior craft ‘enhancing sight to produce insight’.

I’m afraid that the only immediate insight I got from Dan Hughes’s show is that varnish makes paintings very shiny. (That and what follows after a couple of days reflection …). My own recent experiences with practicing the craft of painting, in relation to rendering and toward the achievements of the Old Masters is that craft alone clearly isn’t enough.

I’m reminded of one of the more famous excerpted essays I’ve encountered reading art and literary criticism, in which R.G. Collingwood states in his 1938 book, The Principles of Art, (quoting Coleridge): ‘we know a man for a poet because he makes us poets’, as Collingwood explains, ‘the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can only express it when the poet has shown them how’.

Our everyday familiarity with language is enough to help us appreciate those who can use words well, and how a well turned phrase can unlock for us understanding not available by being inarticulate (hence my loathing of jargon based literary and art writing).

We don’t seem to share such a facility with images, especially crafted ones, since most of us don’t draw and paint, although most of us do take photographs. So someone like Dan Hughes, just because he can paint like that, means he gets a pass by default into a show. It also seems to mean that those who can’t draw and paint are awestruck at first impression by his ability, so much so that the impression is one of appreciation, and if they can afford it, the seduction of their chequebooks.

Some stuff, by what it represents, will grow in value - like Mike Bayne’s, whose images of today’s everyday will appear quaint in a century and will tie that time to ours, giving them a sense of where they came from. But Hughes’s images are already boring, and I’m uncertain as to how they could grow in value. Nothing represented is worth sharing, none of the images will help the future understand its past. Skulls, self-portraits, business men on stairs … been there done that and gave away the t-shirt. I don’t write this or what follows to be mean, nor to causally disregard it simply for the clichés that they are as much as I mean it as constructive criticism with hopes that Hughes will grow as an artist and that he can put his considerable skill to better use in the future.

And here I’ll acknowledge what these images must be all about: they’re studio exercises he’s trying to offload because he doesn’t want to store them somewhere. He must be thinking, ‘might as well sell them to someone who’d like to have it in their livingroom’ which is all fine and dandy, but let’s be clear about that.

I need to point out that the main thing that makes these images uninteresting is the dark colour scheme - like I said, it’s too 17th Century, when it was fashionable for paintings to be dark. There was a reason for that then, namely, the high cost of coloured pigments against the sort of mass production of images for people’s homes - for a while there, paintings were affordable for the masses. For his own reasons, Hughes has chosen to ignore the past 150 years of paint and pigment development. And part of this criticism also fits into my pet theory of Canadian painters being united via a coincidental (aka cultural) appreciation for bright pallets - something that would seem to have lots to with our being a northern latitude country. So, if he’d used bright colours, filled these paintings with light, taken advantage of the range of affordable pigments available to early 21st Century painters - then I imagine these images transformed, amazing, worth going to see.

As it is, we can do that ourselves with Photoshop. In that sense Hughes is accidentally at the cutting edge of what’s going in our culture at large. Recognizing that the form crafted in the studio (the painting as object) is ultimately only the first version and separable from the content (the image), which can be modified, and re-edited, manipulated, etc. One day, one of these images of one of these paintings will have its levels adjusted in Photoshop before being printed for a bedroom wall. And that is what it comes down to. He, nor the gallery, nor the buyer, have the final say of what these images are supposed to look like. Since they seem to be nothing more than an exercise, you wouldn’t really be re-writing their meaning because they don’t mean anything in the first place.

And hence the image I’m using to illustrate this entry - folded and torn, it’s the reproduced image of a rather large painting, once again reproduced here and modified by my use of it that evening to exchange email address and give out the address as to where we were all going afterward. It perhaps more than anything communicates what this show is all about to me - a decoration to daily life, a nice backdrop to find some common ground with a pretty stranger.

Dan Hughes at Edward Day Gallery until June 12th

(image of Dan Hughes’s invite after a night of email exchanges and note-taking)

Ah the isms, can’t live with ‘em, can’t have good arguments without them. And for the past thirty years, we’ve seen a flourishing of isms, one that could almost be said to have sprung from the fertilized soil of the World War’s dead a generation prior. To some they were flowers, to others they have been weeds.

And JRS is one who’s seen them as weeds. I’ve come to find them somewhat noxious myself, which is one of the reasons that I’ve grown fond of his thinking, and over the winter I read most of his books. It is also for that reason that I was particularly excited when I learned in March that he had a new book coming out. There was also a geeky pleasure to know that with the publication of a new text he’d be speaking in Toronto at some point, which turned out to be sooner rather than later.

JRS spoke at U of T’s MacMillan Theatre a week ago now, which I eagerly attended and like the keener I am took a seat dead centre in the third row because lectures for me are more exciting than rock concerts.

Having received a review copy of The Collapse of Globalism a week and half before, I must say that I was only able to get half way through it before seeing JRS in person. The first half of the book traces the history of the globalist ideology, which swept through the governments of the Western world over the past 30 years (which is also equivalent to my lifetime). But, even JRS conceded while presenting an overview of his arguments, ‘what could be more boring than economics’. I tried to cram last week to get ready for the talk, but found myself easily distracted by such mundane activities as mowing the lawn, because it was sunny out and I didn’t want to be stuck inside reading boring economic history, albeit written with Saul’s wonderful style. There is also the element of extreme annoyance at seeing, in the black and white of the text, at how stupid the political leadership has been, those which Saul refers to as ‘elites’ in his indiviudal way (a sort of Saul glossary is available through his 1994 book, The Doubter’s Companion).

Near the end of his talk, Saul referenced the coming democratic crisis, noting that the political energy of a critical mass of people under 40 is going into NGOs and similar enterprises, seeking influence over political decisions, and noting how that’s all they can ever hope to accomplish. (He spoke at length on this in his inaugural Lafontiane-Bladwin speech five years ago, from which I excerpted the relevant portion for my Goodreads list). But, this follows from the globalist ideology, because as he noted, what better way to drive young people away from politics than to keep telling them they don’t have power, that the whole thing is run by corporations?

That’s been the story that I grew up with. It’s also one of the reasons I find someone like Saul so refreshing, because he’s part of that generation seduced by the neo-conservative economists who call themselves neo-liberal (liberal as in ‘free trade’ etc), and yet speaks for the other side; speaks in a way that gives me hope for a better tomorrow, as soon as my generation is given the power to change things. As a traitor to the ideology of his generation, I see Saul as a potential hero to the younger ones.

He’s certainly been my intellectual hero, as he’s attacked those who’ve who constructed another an ism to be a prism: the prism of economics to explain the rainbow variety of the world’s reality. Of course, it should be obvious of how much of this is nonsense. But we’ve lived under this reality because the political leadership essentially through up their hands and said, ‘it’s inevitable, we can’t do anything about it’.

Saul has particular loathing for that word, ‘inevitable’. It’s background was a little mysterious to me when I first heard him speak 7 years ago. He’s continually bitched in his books at how the political leadership was arguing that globalization was inevitable, and there was nothing they could do except jump on the bandwagon. He explained where this came from: the apparent root of this loathing which has spurned him on to write all these books over the past while.

While he was in Paris in the early 70s (during the time I presume in which he was working on his PHD thesis on the modernization of France and basking in his own hero-worship of De Gaulle) the then president of the country, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came on television to announce (and I paraphrase Saul’s paraphrase here): ‘thank you very much for electing me, you’re all very smart to have done so since I know everything, and I’ve studied the problem, and concluded there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It’s worth quoting the relevant passage from the book:

“Giscard came to power in the midst of those seminal crises of oil, inflation, unemployment, and no growth. He counterattacked as a technocrat could and made no impact … Giscard became bewildered. Discouraged.

“Then one night he appeared on television to address the people. He told them that great global forces were at work. These were new forces. Forces of inevitability. Forces of economic interdependence. There was little a national government could do. He was powerless.

“This historic appearance was probably the original declaration of Globalization as a freestanding force escaping controls of all men. It was also the invention of the new leader: the manager as castrato. This approach created quite a fashion among leaders at all levels. The easy answer to the most difficult problems was increasingly to lament publicly that you were powerless. Impotent. That your large budgets, your public structures, the talents and determination of your population could make little difference. These were not problems to be solved. These were manifestations of the global reality.”

Here seems to be the roots of his argument against technocratic experts and impotent political leadership and throwing one’s hands up in the face of inevitability. The crisis was an economic one, simply a lack of imaginative thinking. Saul argued in the Unconscious Civilisation that since politicians had given up leadership in favour of management, all they could ever do is manage, they didn’t have what it takes to lead society with creative solutions. I guess this is where I got my fire burning toward civic engagement, and the lingering bitterness I have toward the artworld in which I’m immersed: because if artists are the ones society trains to be creative, they’re wasting everyone’s time with these installations.

Not that I’m advocating all artists go into politics (remembering the Hitler example, I don’t think that’s such a good idea for the most part) but he argued last week that we’re in a vacuum now. Since 9/11, the castrated politicians suddenly realise they have balls and are pulling the strings, but they come from a generation who went into politics with the understanding that they would be making concessions to corporations. Now that the situation has reversed itself, and corporations are showing no respect for community infrastructure, the governments don’t really know what to do. Hence, Ottawa for past six months.

I see that whole circus as the chickens coming home to roost: the consequences of what he spoke about in his Massey Lectures ten years ago. At the same time, he’s married to the head of the government, so the chicanerie doesn’t seem so bad, since Mom and Pop have good heads on their shoulders even though they aren’t really supposed to have any influence. (I have faith that everything will turn out fine because Saul has the ear of the GG).

Now I have to bring something up which bothered me about his argument,something he opened himself up to. It’s a case of illogic, for he stated that one can recognize an idealogue by how much they won’t even admit to potentially being wrong; to the idealogue, what they believe is simply ‘true’. This got some laughter from the audience, but from then on, I wanted him to address the ‘truth’ of his arguments. He’s got it pretty good right - married to the Governor General; and he gets to write books destined to be bestsellers, he gets to work out the thoughts via lectures delivered on the ribbon-cutting itinerary, and he draws a sell-out crowd of the city’s thoughtful citizens. He gets to preach to a choir, and those unlike myself who haven’t reached the level of the sychophantic I imagine are at least impressed by His Excellent resumé.

Which is all to say that JRS is enabled in promoting his own ideology. His own ism. This one is older than most, being the one called humanism. As I see myself most influenced by those set of ideas, and operating within that history myself, it follows that Saul’s ism arm me for great arguments, and are breath of fresh air in the sickly academic atmosphere of bullshit that I’ve associated in.

I first saw Saul speak at Kings College in Halifax in 1998, and I found it very influential. It’s perhaps one the reasons I’m writing this now, on a blog I mean, since the way he disparaged the elites then as ‘not doing their job’ (in the earlier books he speaks of Canada’s elites as being the laziest in the world) prompted me to believe in the power of the public intellectual. That ideas and art and all this stuff that I was studying at the time belonged to everybody, and that it was part of a civic duty to criticize bad ideas as much as it was a duty to vote and follow politics because it’s there that decisions are made that affect our lives.

His relentlessly fair approach as well, as mocking what is foolish, and conceding his own defects now and then, is one of the reasons I find his writing extraordinary and highly influential. The belief is that we’re all in this together. We all want what’s best. There are many forces of divisiveness that we need to overcome. Perhaps his basic argument is ‘pay attention’. In that way you become conscious, and can decide for yourself. That’s the essence of a democracy, people deciding their own future, rather than giving up in the face of inevitability. That way, we emerge from being an Unconscious Civilisation.

You have the choice to read this book or not. You have the choice to buy it in a small bookshop or in a Chapters. Of course you can see that I’ll recommend that you do, since I’m a fan an all. But I can say that a knowledge of the history of this ideology from his perspective is quiet valuable, and that Saul’s work as a whole functions in the ways that education is supposed to: it empowers you in your own choice making. It helps you become a better citizen, and by becoming a better citizen, the world becomes a better place. As for the lecture - as I type this, I have TVO’s Big Ideas on in the living room, and I have a feeling this lecture will be broadcast on Big Ideas sometime in the coming months, so you’ll have the chance to see it for yourselves.

You’ll see how he began the talk by telling us of how on May 19th, the City Council of Burlington rejected an application from Wal-Mart to build a centre there, even after all the experts (the evil technocrats of Saul’s cosmology) said it would be a good thing. Here, the ‘common’ men and women of the council said something to the effect that Wal-Mart may know how to lower prices but they know nothing of fostering communities. And here is Saul’s story over the past decade’s happy ending: the collapse of an ideology of markets, when the common citizens take back the power their ancestors won from aristocrats centuries ago, to be able to say no thanks.