/Blog

I drafted the majority of this a couple of weeks ago, in light of the recent announcement of the funding cuts. In the interim weeks, Leah Sandals and Jennifer McMackon have done better jobs than I could have in assembling related links. Also, in the past week, it became increasingly clear that Harper will call an election within the next two weeks, making these controversial cuts and copyright bill null and void unless the Conservatives return to power with another minority or, god help us, a majority.

I live in a riding with an NDP candidate, and I will with good conscious vote to reelect her. Doubly, as a citizen of Toronto, I’m in an essentially Liberal area. For this reason, it has been said over the previous two and half years (since the last election) that the Conservatives have been screwing us over. It has also been said that Harper ideally wants to destroy the Liberal party. Do we really want to have such a petty and vindictive bunch of assholes deciding things for the other 33 million of us? Equally troubling is the fact that Harper grew up in Etobicoke, which is to say, Harper hates his home town. Well, fuck him too, and the scare-mongering flyers I’ve been receiving in my mailbox.

To Take Care of Oneself

As artists, it’s not a question that society owes us a living; to use that phrase is itself problematic - to say use the word owe, suggesting a debt or some other economic transaction.

For me, I go back to my early 20s, having gone through art school and having met and befriended people who in many ways weren’t really capable of taking care of themselves. They were deficient in life skills primarily, but also in terms of coping mechanisms. It wasn’t so much that they were losers or retarded in the legitimate sense of the word, but they were just different, round pegs for society’s square holes. Myself, I’d like to live in a society of difference/variety/heterogeneity. How we deal with the challenges presented by ‘un-normal’ people is one by which we can measure the state of our civilization. Since for me civilization is about the education we provide and acquire to remove ourselves as far as possible from the states of animals (who are fearful, ignorant and cruel), a civilized society is one reflective of communities of care and of elevated compassion: a state present even in animals but which we can nurture and encourage more of as self-aware beings.

In grade school, we had a class of ’special kids’ who were the ones in wheelchairs, or were borderline blind, or whatever. One girl in particular I remember as probably having cerebral palsy. Because of the area (rural Nova Scotia) this class might have been doubling as a day care (I’m not sure what type of education was being provided) but for the most part, adapting to the needs of these children was taken for granted as the proper thing to do. It taught me that I lived in a civilized society because these people were both cared for and not to be mocked. Through this a sense of compassion was both taught and encouraged.

In my 20s, I learned that some people weren’t able to take care of themselves. And the lesson for me was just because this is so doesn’t mean people should be poor, unemployable and underemployed, nor end up homeless. It should be possible to accept these people and make sure they have homes, enough money for food and clothing and comfortable lives. There’s no need for them to suffer just because they’re different.

Like the disabled children of my community, they should to be taken care of. As a rich society not overwhelmed by the incompetent (I’d guess they’re less than 20% of the population), it should cost peanuts to make sure these people have ok lives. Considering that the real fuck-ups who end of in jail are cared for by the state, investing in keeping the annoying from becoming homeless and moochy shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

Maybe all they need is some kind of compassionate service - a councilor or a social worker. In terms of homelessness explicitly, I’ve heard it said that many are people who would be fine if they had a stable address and a social worker to help them take their medications on time. This doesn’t seem a lot to ask. If we can provide services for those who are not able-bodied, we should also accept that some people are just born different, and that they are just not ‘able-minded’ by what are thought of as society’s norms. ¹

There is room for critique as to what constitutes the able-minded, but that is for another discussion. Meanwhile we’ve had plenty of critique of society’s norms, and while that has brought to light these considerations, they haven’t done much to encourage people toward compassion.

People who aren’t capable of fitting-in (to the extent that they can’t take care of themselves in the usually accepted way) just need accommodation and consideration. It isn’t a question of being owed, but of helping people within our community. Those who are physically and congenitally disadvantaged do not argue about being owed a living, but I think they rightfully feel entitled to being treated with respect and dignity.

So, send in the artists, with century old arguments about being owed a living and expecting support from government-funded organizations. What these arguments amount to is artists saying they’re retards who can’t take care of themselves and are essentially hopeless at basic economic management. Given that it was in art school that I began to think about this (as stated), that may be case. However, unlike the trolls commenting on the newspaper-site boards, who are happy with the cuts, I didn’t consider my fellow art-students and graduated artists as losers, but simply different. And so, I’m not very sympathetic to a line of argument that plays into ignorant prejudice among those completely uneducated and insensitive to the arts. The continued begging at government coffers, based on the idea that artists are incapable of surviving without it, seems self-harming and essentially untrue.

On the one hand, artists like to argue that they’re vital to society for all sorts of reasons, but on the other hand, they’re arguing that they’re incapable of functioning within that society. Over here, arguments about the intelligence of art and the superiority of the artist over the corporate clerk, and over there, whining about capitalist exploitation in the Third World while their dealers take 50% of the price of their work. Here a sense of entitlement to government financing, while there, artists who want to be above regulation and censorship while continuing to cash the government cheques.

In a sense, artists have become the ill character of a sitcom who doesn’t want to get better because everyone has become kind and giving toward them. In that manner they’ve degraded themselves and have invited disdain, which by the end of the episode is played for laughs. One of the values of Conservatives is personal responsibility, and the ability to take care of oneself. It thus follows that Conservative governments do not see much value in funding the arts because it’s representative of coddling adults who should be able to self-manage. By arguing that they’re retarded for so long, artists have willfully invited disdain.

Canada is a hard place to live

Sixty years ago, Roberston Davies’ Fortune, My Foe was first performed in Kingston. It contains a line I’ve seen much quoted in arguments reflecting on the development of arts funding in Canada.

Everybody says Canada is a hard country to govern, but nobody mentions that for some people it is also a hard country to live in. Still, if we all run away it will never be any better. So let the geniuses of easy virtue go southward; I know what they feel too well to blame them. But for some of us there is no choice; let Canada do what she will with us, we must stay.

Davies of course did not leave, but stayed and became part of the Canadian cultural legacy. (The internationalism of the film/television and music industries meant that we can still lay claim to those stars who now live elsewhere but who began with Canadian passports). In the years leading up to the 1967 Centenary, Canadians (reflecting a post-war, mid-20th Century modernist mindset as much as anything else) invested in developing a sense of nationalism. The result of this investment is people like John Ralston Saul and Adrienne Clarkson, the only two Canadians left in the media-scape praising Canada as a nation, both old enough to have been young adults at the Centenary, and both now at an age when they just seem like old fuddy-duddies.

The children of their generation is that of my own, kids born in the ’60s and ’70s and in terms of inherited legacies, pot smoking was far more successfully passed on then the spirit of Canadian nationalism. Planted in post-war soil Canadian Nationalism flowered for 1967, was worn in the lapel of Trudeau, then withered and died as is natural for flowers and all other living things. While ambitious and certainly worth the attempt, a government funded attempt at generating an artificial trans-continental consciousness in a place so geographically varied and multicultural is retrospectively absurd and perhaps deserving of it’s demise.

But the 1950s research into this attempt was that of the Massey Commission and the result was the Canada Council. We are told legends by elders of generous funding and ‘National Gallery Biennials’, where every couple of years the National Gallery would ‘define where Canadian art was at’. (src). This was part of the Nationalistic enculturation which produced the likes of Saul and Clarkson. By this early 21st Century, the children of those boomers are much more interested in city-state politics and thinking, founding the likes of Spacing magazine, not really giving a shit about McCleans while mocking Richard Florida even as he legitimizes them to the current crop of out-of-touch establishment.

In his 1993 introduction to a reprint of Fortune my Foe, Davies describes the genesis of the play; after World War II put a stop to touring plays by independent and occasionally American theatre companies, his university friend Arthur Sutherland established a theatre company in Kingston and invited Davies to write a ‘Canadian’ play to complement the repertoire of English and American comedies. In describing this background, Davies defines an artist as ‘a person who enlarges and illuminates the lives of others.’ In commissioning a young Roberston Davies, Sutherland, although aware of the risk…

“…wanted a play about Canada. It was risky because Canada has for a long time been thought a dull country, with dull people. But there was a time when Norway was thought dull, and Ireland was thought absurd, yet both of them brought forth plays which have been acclaimed as treasures by theatres around the world.”

Which reminds me of Norman Mailer’s claim that the economic recovery of Ireland in recent years can be traced to James Joyce. In other words, the capacity of a country to see itself reflected in a work of imagination can both be an ‘enlarging’ experience and also so inspiring to bind a community together. Davies is also claiming that the difference between being considered dull and ‘interesting’ (or cool, in the present sense) is in the nature of one’s self-imagining, and the messages that puts out. If painters of the United States had confined themselves to images of the American Gothic and considered that an accurate self-representation rather than satire, would we not think of the U.S. as dull?

After offering a synopsis of his play, Davies in the ‘93 introduction goes on to say that his task was to make the play not too didactic. Within the structure of the play Davies had a character of a puppeteer, a European immigrant, who is sponsored to give a puppet show by the producer characters of Philpott and Tapscott. As Davies explains, the European puppet master was reflective of the recent wave of European immigrants and refugees from devastated Europe, who brought with them Old World sensibilities about art and culture, and were met with a homegrown New World audience who did not share those same ideas.

“Message,” Davies wrote, “was very much on the lips of Canadians like Philpott and Tapscott, the do-gooders who took up the puppet-show, without having any understanding of its special quality or its cultural background, but who were convinced that the task of art was to teach - to offer a Message, in fact, and to offer it in terms that the stupidest listener could understand. Canada was, and still is, full of such people. They think of art of all kinds as a sort of handmaid to education; it must have a Message and it must get across. The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff”.

Is it not the idea that the Conservatives, in government and individually, are people not touched by feeling? Is this not reflected in Jose Verner’s comments that she would like cultural funding to be efficient? Myself, I like efficiency since it’s about doing as much as possible with the least effort - in other words, ‘being lazy is good’ as they say in computer programing, for just this reason.

It is in fact sensible for the government to want to do this. But it is also the case that the government appears to show a disdain for the arts that lie partially in a complacency engendered by funding. Canadian art is rather pathetic and remains so because the infrastructure was set up within a moment of forethought and generosity, and instead of igniting both the imagination and the culture of the country, merely created institutions staffed by people who take the funding for granted and feel entitled within their institutional titles. Instead of fostering culture, they see themselves as beyond petty and quaint nationalistic concerns and instead fly off to Venice every couple of years to hob-nob with the planet’s remaining arrogant aristocrats, shaking away the dirt of the stupid ‘unwashed masses’ of this country who usually live in the neighborhoods the galleries move to. Admittedly, that’s being overly cynical and ignoring the good that many artist-run centres and other galleries do within their neighborhoods (before raising the market-value of neighboring properties by their presence) but such ‘good’ is questionable as a repetition of a colonial mindset that sees certain groups as needing help: bring them civilization and culture; capital-c Culture having replaced Jesus in a secular society.

On July 17th I had no idea that the programs in question even existed, and I’m in the culture business. Which is to say that the gang of young adults who have turned Toronto’s gallery-area Queen West West into another nightclub district probably have never heard of the programs either. Why then should I or they have cared on August 17th? When I didn’t know they existed I didn’t care, and now that I know they exist and may not for much longer I still don’t care that much. In effect, the Conservatives have potentially legislated my mid-July mindset into existence.

In as much as I’ve gotten emails repeating the contents of a new Facebook group, I have a suspicion this may be a lost cause. As evinced by their artist-statements, artists in this country are rarely capable of being eloquent enough to convince Conservatives or the rest of the population of their value. The Conservatives have upset an easily ignored minority, and inspired such comments as:

“when the government stops spending money on endeavours that provide next to no value to the Canadian people it is not pandering, it is good government. Am I the only person in the god forsaken country that remembers we have a fricking health care crisis? Sure, there is an element of pandering, and there is plenty of other funding that should be pulled but will not be, but the simple act of pulling funding from people who never should have received it is a good thing. End of story.” (from)

and

“I think that is what I was getting at. I’m all for supporting the arts but I feel that people of Mr. Lewis’s status and influence should not be receiving money from the government whether he is right or left wing. A friend of mine is an artist and she maintains most of the arts grants go to people who don’t need them. The real starving artists don’t have the influence to affect awards.” (from)

and

“The government is the one entity in the country that is least likely to make an intelligent decision on how to spend money. In fact, the only reasons to access government funding over private are laziness, a desire to be unaccountable for the funds you receive, and the knowledge that the general public sees no value in your product.

The government should contribute to the arts through tax credits alone. This can amount to a large amount of support, ensures there will be a respectable amount of accountability built into the system, and will bring the arts community closer to the community it supposedly serves.” (from)

yet, there is one considered argument:

“Fund the Olympics and not artists? Artists leave something behind for future generations; athletes… well, they’re fun to watch. Someone said independent producers such as Avi Lewis should pay to find their own distributors. Maybe. But then you should be consistent and argue against ALL government economic subsidies and incentives. Let’s stop subsidizing automakers, oil companies, the aerospace industry, etc. For the most part, the organizations and individuals affected here are either completely non-ideological (such as Tafelmusik) or engaging in economic development for Canadian businesses, which employ Canadians (such as the Hot Docs festival’s Toronto Documentary Forum, which among other things, brings foreign investment into Canadian productions). Finally, what’s lost here is that arts and culture have always been an important part of international diplomacy. The Tories are letting their ideology trump the national interest. Shame on them.” (from)

But in regards to Tafelmusik, a baroque orchestra playing on period instruments, they charge between $89 to $15 dollars a ticket. Surely they work a profit margin in there somewhere? Surely those wealthy egotists so eager to have their name immortalized for the a decades on a hospital wing (or listed in platinum lettering in the lobby of retarded new ‘expansions’ ignored by people waiting in line to pay $22 to see largely empty galleries) can find a mil or two to send the Bach to China?

[Cross-posted from Goodreads 08w35:2]

(From Goodreads 08w26:1)

I saw Darren O’Donnell at the Toronto Free Gallery opening last Thursday night and he told me he’d been engaged in the past week with an online debate about the validity of his work with Mammalian Diving Reflex, a debate initiated by Gabriel Moser and picked up on the Sally McKay’/Lorna Mills blog.

I’ve recently moved and had been in no rush to get the net at home set up, a situation further compounded by Rogers’ incompetence (I’m posting this from work dear reader), so this debate had escaped my attention. However, alerted by Darren, I looked up the links at work on Friday and printed off the conversation for some weekend reading. My immediate reaction (especially having converted it to page-length) was ‘wow’ - to the two documents both approximately 20 pages in length. As much as Darren was enervated by the criticism, at least this was a conversation being had.

I met Darren shortly before he began his `social acupuncture` projects, and so I’ve always felt I had an insider’s perspective on them, having participated in and been witness to some of their earlier manifestations. Further, I was at the book launch for his Social Acupuncture (meaning I read it as soon as was possible) and so I have the insight provided by his brilliant essay at the back of my mind with regard to the work.

What Moser and Sandals provide me with is the perspective of someone who doesn’t know Darren personally. Sandals is upfront in admitting she doesn’t like Darren which biases her against the work (src). Another friend of mine admitted that he didn’t quite understand what the work was about art-wise either, but at the time I countered that it was part of our culture’s move away from fiction toward non-fiction (a personal interpretation I worked out somewhat in Goodreads 07w11:1).

I do take issue with one of Moser’s interpretations, since it made me sputter in indignation. I’ve never met Ms. Moser and would like to think we could get along in the future, but I have to nominate one of her paragraphs as one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.

Speaking of the humor of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s work with children, she wrote:

But the pessimistic part of me thinks that the humour actually lies in something far less self-aware and much more sinister. This part - let’s call it the UBC indoctrinated part - thinks that the humour actually comes from a strange and almost colonial kind of child-adult anthropomorphism. That when adults see these kids trying to play grown up, the humour comes from the fact that we think they’re ‘cute’ in a patronizing way - that their inability to successfully inhabit these [adult] roles is funny in the same way that watching a dog awkwardly dressed in a human business suit is funny.

Anthropomorphism is a completely inappropriate concept to apply to children, suggesting that they aren’t part of our species (only adults are truly human ?) but are akin to dogs dressed up. I am surprised that this thought occurred to her, and doubly surprised that she saw fit to publish it. If only UBC indoctrination had taught her to recognize foolishness when it occasionally occurs, even in the best of minds.

I find nothing humorous about the Mammalian Projects, nor does ‘cute’ really enter into it for me. I’m informed by Darren’s ideas about acupuncture - that you’re poking a dam to hopefully collapse it and return the flow - and in this case, Darren is working with our society’s totally fucked up ideas about children. These ideas are so fucked up that a writer doesn’t recognize how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘anthropomorphic’ when speaking of them.

I keep thinking of a passage from Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. In Pattern 57, Children in the City Alexander wrote:

If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world round about them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.

The need for children to have access to the world of adults is so obvious that it goes without saying. The adults transmit their ethos and their way of life to children through their actions, not through statements. Children learn by doing and by copying. If the child’s education is limited to school and home, and all the vast undertakings of a modern city are mysterious and inaccessible, it is impossible for the child to find out what it really means to be an adult and impossible, certainly, for him to copy it by doing.

This separation between the child’s world and the adult world is unknown among animals and unknown in traditional societies. In simple villages, children spend their days side by side with farmers in the fields, side by side with people who are building houses, side by side, in fact, with all the daily actions of the men and women round about them: making pottery, counting money, curing the sick, praying to God, grinding corn, arguing about the future of the village.

But in the city, life is so enormous and so dangerous, that children can’t be left alone to roam around. There is constant danger from fast-moving cars and trucks, and dangerous machinery. There is a small but ominous danger of kidnap, or rape, or assault. And, for the smallest children, there is the simple danger of getting lost. A small child just doesn’t know enough to find his way around a city.

The problem seems nearly insoluble. But we believe it can be at least partly solved by enlarging those parts of cities where small children can be left to roam, alone, and by trying to make sure that these protected children’s belts are so widespread and so-far reaching that they touch the full variety of adult activities and ways of life.

For me, Darren’s work is about restoring the balance of incorporating young people into a community, to break them away from the segregation we enforce onto them through class-rooms and age-based learning. Writing in the 1970s, Alexander hinted that unless children interact with adults, they cannot become ‘adults’ themselves. As a child of the same decade, I recognize the effects the subsequent decades have had on my generation and those that have followed. As Lorna Mills points out in one of her comments:

…brings to mind the late Neil Postman and his wonderful book The Disappearance of Childhood where he, at one point, proposed it was actually adulthood that was disappearing.

For generations we have effectively controlled the community that our children and young adults experience so that they only really know a community of each other. In my case, it was only toward my mid-twenties that I began to make friends with people significantly older than myself.

Now, that’s what I like about the Mammalian projects; that it’s a fuck-you to a society that segregates children and treats them like precious little angels and not human beings. Having watched the 1970’s The Bad News Bears recently, I was struck by how adult those adolescents seemed: they drank, smoked, swore and said offensive things. That’s pretty much how I remember that age range for myself. And yet, in the thirty years since that movie, children are now routinely depicted as being smart-alecky technical whiz-kids, cute and precious and silly, and if Speilberg’s involved, crying for their fucking daddies.

An anti-adult Boomer ideology has infected everything and I know thirty-somethings who proclaim with pride a Peter Pan syndrome (and I’m not talking about Michael Jackson). This is to say that the only valid model of Being now acceptable is the youthful one, which by definition is immature. This indoctrination leads to the belief that it is better to be pre-formed that fully-formed, better to cut yourself off from your full potential as a being, and be happy with the state leading up to it. In art terms, it is better to be a sketch than to be fully rendered.

Yes, I understand the prejudice: that adults are humourless squares. That their spirits are dead and they’ve lost their collective imagination. But I grew up with an understanding that each decade of life offered something unique to experience, and I wasn’t going to settle for the awkwardness and patronization I’d experienced throughout my childhood and adolescence as being all I could expect from life. While adults of previous generations had given the condition a bad name, that doesn’t mean we should refuse to embrace our biological destiny. A little bit of historical awareness should mean we can chose to be a type of adult that suits us. I understand today that there are those who are choosing to be Peter Pan types - fine. I just wish it wasn’t so popular.

ART
As an anonymous commenter pointed out on the Moser post, the projects ’should be critiqued from a performance art point of view first and foremost, just as a painting would be critiqued. I’d like to see if anyone will actually look beyond the “kids in parkdale” thing and see the thing as art, because the fact that no one has so far (as far as I know) says more about our perceptions and ideologies than Darren’s.’

As art, Darren is working self-consciously working within the Relational Aesthetics stream of contemporary practice. Relational Aesthetics emphasizes events over objects - one goes to the gallery/space to experience something rather than to just see/hear something. Relational Aesthetics as a movement has already jumped the shark according to some, but I think that type of judgment just highlights an allegiance to being trendy. It is valid exploration within our structured society, which often highlights what we take for granted about our relations with one another. For example, Mammalian’s projects highlight that we take ignoring kids and their imagination for granted.

Chuck Close is said to teach his students that ‘if it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody elses’. That is, it’s familiar, established, and probably by consequence unoriginal. Art has become a series of familiar forms, and all it took was Nicolas Bourriaud to write a 114 page book and call it ‘relational aesthetics’ for artsters to stop saying ‘what the fuck’ and be all uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity, and to start exploiting the possibilities of this form of performance and theatre.

In a comment on her post, Moser uses Diana Borsato’s use of tangoing police officers (during 2006’s Nuit Blanche) as something more obviously ‘art’ because she used adults. (Borsato herself weighs in here). MDR’s use of children puts their work (for the 2006 Nuit Blanche, ‘ballroom dancing’) in the realm of ‘community art’. This seems entirely a personal interpretation on her part, but one informed by the familiar and by our privileging childhood as something ’special’, the same way the drooling kids in our schools were ’special’ … i.e. not ‘normal’.

That’s not denigrate ’specialness’ and emphasize ‘normality’. The value of living in a democratic society is the expansion of possibility. When we narrow options and narrow culture to something familiar then we’ve narrowed the possibility of our imaginations. Artists know this intuitively and it’s part of the artistic ideology. The language used often contrasts boring vs. exciting, narrow vs. unlimited, possible vs. impossible, etc. It’s why there are protests against turning studios into condos, and freak-outs seeing gym-thugs in former gallery spaces turned into magazine-layout restaurants. Because a narrow frame of possibility has been drawn around something that was once more vague and voluntarily undefined.

We are still at a point socially where we don’t know how to recognize what ‘drooling kids’ have to offer, and prefer to shape people into suits, give them Blackberries and expect them to buy a house or a condo. If they jump through the required hoops to adopt ‘the form’ then it doesn’t matter if their lives are empty of meaning. All that’s important is that they look like they have something to offer (even if what they end up offering is 40+ hours of their lives a week to make their bosses’ lives easier).

(Moser points out that Canadians don’t like to talk about class, but it’s a North American and Commonwealth phenomenon - an aspect of colonial legacy. Class is part of the human psyche, and it’s an achievement of post-colonial civilization to down-play it, and a failure to see it become resurgent. Just as taught hygiene keeps certain diseases away, it’s representative of educational failure when a type of psychological typhoid manifests itself again.)

Thus, good art should bring us unfamiliar experiences. (Although, I have to say here, I’m pissed off when artists seem to chose to bring us negative unfamiliar experiences, emphasizing the disgusting and annoying as if that is somehow worth experiencing). Good art should help make us aware of the variety of possibility.

But the definition of Art itself has become too narrow to fully incorporate the explosion of creativity that we have been made aware of through the internet. Consider that in less than two years, an entirely new dialect has been created through the captioning of funny cat pictures. Oh Hai! This wasn’t controlled or planned, but just happened … through humour and through our innate sense of how (our) language works. In as much as I’m an old fashioned humanist, I am so because human beings remain consistently surprising and creative. And the arts have remained valuable and evolved away from Van Gogh landscapes into rice-cooking because in the past century, specialization and over-rationalization have become ideological, to the point that structure is confused with form and appreciated over content. We are a civilization in love with the shape of bowls, but care little about what fills them. Thus, we have edible items without nutritional content, bodies trained to exert forces unrequired for playing video games, and photographs in closets mocking the way we looked twenty years ago. And, an artist once known for filling bowls now gets away with closing doors with walls, a form contrived to evoke content forty-years out of date.

Art schools are schizophrenically complicit in this: while they teach future artists to be critical of the shapes of society, they also expect artists to fit into these shapes, to make familiar art while attempting to make unfamiliar art as well.

Perhaps it is no wonder that so much contemporary art is as bad as it is. When I was recently graduated, I used to tell myself and others that it was impossible to suck, since the anarchism on display in galleries was impossible to judge. But we still want to judge it, we want to be able to say ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and that means we each need some personal standard. What I’ve learned in the years since graduating is that artists do indeed have personal standards, and for the most part, the cliques within the art communities come together around a shared standard … but this is unpredictable, and often dependent on who one’s teacher was at whatever particular school one went to.

This insight has discredited cultural criticism for me. It is an incompatible position to want cultural anarchy as an allowance of possibility and an expansion of potential inspiration, and at the same time to want culture narrowed to the familiar and the immediately comprehensible. Personally, I haven’t quite got that down yet, and still get pissed off in galleries when I see easy work that looks like it’s wasting my time.

But I understand this duality exists in my mind because I’m a person born into the late 20th Century and seeking an expanded open future in the 21st. I am trying to unlearn 20th Century culture and learn the 21st Century one. Which is to say, I’m trying to reject the shit of the past in order to be a type of person which I feel would fit the 21st Century world that I want to live in. The 20th Century narrowed possibilities to binary check-boxes: apocalypse or utopia; 1 vs. 0, employed vs. unemployed, male vs. female, businessman or hippy, movie vs. theatre … etc. A little bit of history shows that people didn’t always live that way.

So, all this being said, I’ll sum it up this way: the Mammalian Diving Reflex projects are awesome, they’re fun, and they’re Darren’s admitted attempts to change his world by expanding his own horizons. Some people don’t get it and they’re allowed to. Some people don’t get it because they’re trying to fit a round peg into the art-world’s square hole. I get it in an idiosyncratic way that I hope I’ve shared, and in so doing hope that I’ve helped illuminate something for others. - Timothy

I just found this laying around the hard-drive. It’s something I wrote at the beginning of February, meant as a reply posting on a web-forum before I abandoned it as too long and potentially off-topic. I also read it now and think it dates me as a 30-something pre-Millennial with 20th Century memories. I’m not so sure the sentiments herein expressed would resonate with early 20-somethings who hate old art as being too much Church-stuff. I’m also not sure how many 20-something artists are dealing with legacy-Marxists on a regular basis, as I have over the past decade.

***

One of the lessons of the 20th Century was that the world changes every ten years. Each decade compressed the changes of a mediaeval century, and yet the arts don’t seem to have clued into this. My reason for pursuing the arts came from it’s humanism, as expressed especially in the 1960s, which I now recognize as being part of the Western World’s healing process following World War II. As a teenager, the Time-Life series on artists produced at that time were an introduction to a cultural world that I was not being taught in my rural Nova Scotia school.

The humanistic aspect of the arts is still what politicians and journalists are likely to throw at us - the arts encourage ‘life’ with mystical overtones. I now understand why that was propagated in the years following the Second World War, but by the time I went to art-school (following the idea that a cultured life was the one the most worth living) I ran into bitter and disagreeable adults who hated the word `beauty`, hated the word `humanism`, and instead taught me to be angry with capitalism, patriarchy, corporations and the other suspects. Thus enraged, I was then encouraged to express my thoughts on the matter through obfuscation, conceptual trickery, (and those other usual techniques) not in writing - since I was expected to be only barely literate - but my making something to be exhibited in a plain white room.

Once out of art school, I thought of myself as a young professional trained in my field and yet found that income-via-arts-employment was rare, the already-expensive credentialing inadequate, and the grant system to be more of a nepotistic lottery, and no one was as smart as they thought they were; more or less they were merely quoters, not thinkers. Old ideas, not new. As long as they could throw a quote at you from one of those bitter French men (they who hated capitalism, humanism and the usual) then they considered themselves not only smart, but superior, and it didn’t matter if their day jobs did not coincide with their training. We were all channeled into a bohemian life of obscurity and intellectual self-deception.

My sense then is that the arts professionals of Canada have totally lost track of the game. They are very quick to adopt the thinking of foreigners while denigrating their home culture. Their greatest ambition is to leave the country. Trained to be hateful of contemporary society, they are too disagreeable to be employable by the corporations who could use them. And here it comes back to the humanistic heritage - your average person who respects the arts does so because of that humanistic heritage, and yet the too-cool-for-school artist today will quickly mock this superficial understanding.

Why then, is there little art is schools? Perhaps because ’sensible’ adults don’t want their kids around the bad influence of either hippy-dippy mystics or disgruntled communists. Those of us who understand why that is an oversimplification and an unfair stereotype are the ones who probably already have their kids involved in the arts. They’re not as rare as we may think, and highlights the political thinking against universalizing art education - politicians think parents-who-want-it find a way outside of the public system. It’s a lifestyle option, and an ethnically specific one at that.

My own, disillusioned sense, is that the arts do not have the value invested into them by 19th Century European snobs. I never use the word `disinterested` for example, except when talking Kantian aesthetics. The writings of John Ruskin I find to be mostly unreadable due to being obsolete. Clement Greenberg, nor Andy Warhol, ever heard the word ‘email’ in their lifetime, let alone ‘world-wide-web’. For that matter, Warhol never got the chance to use Photoshop.

Industrial manufacturing has given us a world of aesthetically pleasing products, and talent for image making is now found in the worlds of design and illustration. (Jutxapoz magazine). Installation art tends to amount to bad set design, and performance art to bad acting. I see better art videos on YouTube than I do in galleries, and on YouTube they don’t try to be art. If you consider the Mona Lisa to be the first viral image, it’s easy to extend the consideration to how much a viral video has passed the test of the audience, making it legitimate art.

These are examples of how our world has changed, and I feel like ‘the visual arts’ are a fossilized cultural product from at most, the 1980s. Future historians will look to illustration, design, and films to gauge our culture, and especially the YouTube archives. Like the photography of a century ago, it’s the stuff taken with Kodaks that are of interest, not the stuff trying to imitate romantic paintings.

If we want to have galleries in our towns and cities, it is important that we all understand why they are important. I still value art for it’s humanism. But our culture is so creative outside of galleries, and it is this creativity that is accessible to people who haven’t studied art. The argument shouldn’t then be to have an art for those professionals - it should be accessible to all. A life in the arts should broaden one’s possibilities, not narrow them to the life of a clique.

When people talk about `art` these days, I no longer know what they’re talking about. I suspect they are talking about some hipster club they don’t want a corporate dork to join. But that exclusion denies someone who needs art is their life from having it - and the result is Canadian culture in 2008.

Marni Soupcoff called for the elimination of the artist grant system earlier this week and there’s been an expected response.

There are two types of artist I know: those who love the council-system and those who dislike it for encouraging ’safe’ work.

I’m of the latter sort. My feelings are that the council system is made up of juries who are into one particular type of art. So, the assumption being that if you’re a painter specializing in the type of portraits and landscapes appreciated by grandmothers, you don’t have a chance of getting a grant. The so-called ’safe’ work is whatever’s hip, and that’s impossible to pin down from year to year: it’s a fashion, it moves through communities as people imitate one another, it’s original source unknown and unimportant. In today’s globalized culture, the determination of what’s hip is dominated by bigger players, and is probably documented and originated in magazines like Artforum rather than C Magazine. (That’s a specifically visual-arts reference. There was a blurb I saw on a TV news channel scrawl saying that hip-hop is the least well funded of the all the art genres by the Canada Council, and yet hip-hop is obviously the most relevant music genre to most young people. The evident bias there is an example of my point).

I got a couple of grants in my time, and I appreciated them. They allowed me to execute projects without having to invest my own money, of which I had none. Looking back, I’m not sure if these projects meant much to society as a whole, which is why I no longer take the ‘art is important to society’ argument too seriously. I’ve come to think of art as something more private and personal. And I feel I make more money working than I would by relying on the hand-outs of grants and prizes. I dislike the current-system of cultural funding as it exists, but I wouldn’t support scrapping it altogether.

What I don’t like about this type of ‘taxpayer bitching’ is how the ‘angry conservative’ stereotype falls into ‘I don’t want them spending my money…’. I’ve always found this reason to be nonsense. I don’t understand why we don’t teach people to think of taxes as that salary we citizens pay toward the functioning of the state. Imagine if employers started saying, ‘I don’t want you spending my money on drugs, or drunken weekends, or McDonald’s hamburgers, or home stereo systems, or …’ etc. Employers know where to draw that line in minding their own business. We in turn should trust our governments to spend their funding responsibly, and when, as often happens, it is exposed that they haven’t been doing so, there should be scandal, there should be apologies and firings, and we appreciate the reforms that follow. Corruption should never be the norm, but it should never be unexpected either. ‘Show me a completely smooth operation,’ Frank Herbet wrote in one of his Dune novels, ‘and I’ll show you a cover up. Real boats rock.’ ¹ In other words, human beings are never perfect, and we shouldn’t expect that.

It should not be the case however that the citizen comes to think of culture as an irresponsible expenditure, and yet that has been allowed to happen within my lifetime. We, as a first world nation, can afford to encourage the imagination. God knows we need to in this country.

We pay taxes and we expect a functioning public service and stable infrastructure in return. We aren’t the United States with a military industrial complex, wherein the government subsidizes global violence. We could instead have a cultural-industrial complex and the most we’d have to suffer is visual pollution and bad music, but it would be preferable to a painful and ugly death. Of course, this isn’t on the table because the money is currently in War, and so when we hear talk of Canadian governments trying to attract investment in science, we should ask, science for what? The fact that the Cdn Gov blocked the sale of MDA to land-mine-manufacturing ATK this past week shows that we aren’t immune to such questions and considerations.

When we are told triumphantly that the provincial and/or federal government is running a budget surplus, it is evident that they could be doing much more for the citizens. Unfortunately, a penny-pinching mentality has taken hold, which may be useful as private citizens (I’m currently in a penny-pinching mode myself) but I’m not sure it serves the public interest. If anything, governments should be more forthcoming about their plans for a surplus. Paying off some debt - fine. But holding on to it indefinitely? Not so fine. Are you trying to accumulate interest on the monies so that it grows further? Ok, sure. But when are we going to get a day-care system, and a guaranteed income, and bigger minimum wages, and fatter old-age pension cheques, and investment in affordable housing, better and more frequent public transit, lower tuition rates, cancellation of student-loan debt, and on and on…?

The government still seems to think that its constituents are ignorant people with personal attachments to numbers on pay-stubs who can somehow magically trace those exact numbers into the pockets of the so-called welfare mom all pissy because they’ve been legislated into civilized compassion. Soupcoff echoes this argument when she says ‘Canadians are accustomed to having their money transferred from their own bank accounts to those of the nation’s broadcasters, sculptors and poets.’ Soupcoff then plays a class-card, by writing, ‘Government funding ensures that every time these affluent aesthetes sit down to hear a live piano concerto, they enjoy a nice subsidy from lower-class taxpayers, who are sitting at home reading their Harry Potter books and listening to their Nine Inch Nails CDs. It just doesn’t seem fair.’

I for one have been to a live piano concerto, and that was when I could afford it under the TSO’s program of selling $12 tickets to those under 30. Since I’m now over 30, I haven’t been to the TSO in four years. I did however buy the latest Nine Inch Nails CD this past week, to listen to when I want a change from the classical music I used to stream from CBC 2 and which I now get from alternative outlets like Classical 96.3 or icebergradio.com. My personal example here to say that there’s room in life for both Harry Potter and Tolstoy, and that Nine Inch Nails is actually pretty good.

Class-based access to culture is the result of both education and pricing. But it’s also a question of interest. So what if some people just aren’t interested? I’m not interested in Harry Potter (I haven’t read any of the books or seen any of the movies) and in this binary I’m lucky: this makes me look like I made ‘the right choice’ to people like Harold Bloom, who would be happy to see me reading Macbeth if I was interested in magic. But if millions are loving Harry Potter, clearly I’m missing out on something. It’s just a question of taste. (And while Bloom has a point in questioning it’s literary value, life needs the occasional piece of candy).

Greater funding should translate in greater accessibility. The reward of the arts should be available to all. This argument justifies libraries: publicly funded knowledge made accessible. Would Soupcoff suggest we  shut down all libraries because people can buy whatever books they want at Indigo/Chapters? My understanding is that type of argument would have been made in the 19th Century, when publicly funded childhood schooling was considered controversial. But we’ve come to take democratized education and accessible knowledge for granted. We are in the process of achieving a future society where the arts will also be taken for granted and be thus ensured against this type of financial short-sightedness. But we are not there yet.

Perhaps it needs to be said that the argument for ceasing funding was allowed to take hold because the arts were allowed to become incomprehensible. (It did not have to be that way, but that is past. The mistake is allowing it to continue).

To that end, Marni Soupcoff and I agree that, “The decision about what to watch — American Idol or A Beachcombers Christmas — should be one people make for themselves,’ but we do not agree that, ‘[it is]not one the government makes for them (or at least tries to: Despite its best efforts, the government still hasn’t succeeded in getting more than a handful of us to watch CBC television, even if we do pay for it).’ The Government doesn’t make us to anything. As for the CBC, our ‘failure to watch’ is indicative of the corporation’s mismanagement and cultural stupidity. They thought we wanted to watch ‘The One‘.

The traditionally called Higher Arts are more often than not rendered distasteful by being poorly taught, and those like myself who pursue them do so either because they weren’t taught at all (as in my case; no opportunity was taken to ruin them for me) or because the person has a inexplicable passion for them (which also used to be true in my case). Soupcoff: ‘But let’s be honest — who makes up the majority of the audiences of symphonies, art galleries and ballets? It’s middle-class and rich people who can afford to pay for their own entertainment.’

I hate ballet and I don’t understand why Karen Cain is a house-hold name and Jeff Wall is not. Nor, for that matter, why Rex Harrington’s retirement made it onto the CTV news in 2003. But it doesn’t bother me that it’s funded. I went to art school because I wanted to study the arts. For that I was seen by my conventional friends as being weird. I think it’s weird that Toronto has a ballet school, but that’s just to say I sympathize with its potential students, and I’m glad I live in a society where young girls who want to destroy their feet and starve themselves for the pleasure of jumping into the arms of a gay man have a place where they can go and feel welcome. In other words, it’s nice that people have options when it comes to doing something with their lives. And whatever encourages the broadening of those options is a good thing, even if it does to some seem weird.

To that end, we have the arts: it is the realm of imagination where alternative ways to think and live one’s life are fostered. For example, we have been progressively moving toward a more peaceful and ‘civilized’ (in the mannered since of the term) soceity², inspired by the examples offered to us in movies and novels. Consider how Star Trek’s universally acknowledged attraction is it’s vision of a future of inclusion and peace-on-Earth. But Star Trek is an American show and offers an American vision of an American future. If the CBC were living up to its mandate, it would support a Canadian future-based program, to give us some sense of what our future might be like. History is necessary, the present is obvious, but what kind of world are we moving toward? A valid question. We have too many future scenarios that offer dystopias, and we need more utopian ones to inspire us. This is not a job that funding ‘math and science’ will do for us. If the math-n-science is to take us to the Moon and Mars, ask where the idea of going off-world came in the first place.

On the April 7th 2008 episode of TVO’s The Agenda, Steve Paikin asked former Ontario Finance minister Greg Sorbara how high the arts rated in the government’s priorities:

Steve Paikin: Honestly, honestly, how high up the ladder are cultural institutions in the Minster of Finance’s play-book?’
Greg Sorbara: During my time they were really high up.
SP: They’re not education, and they’re not health care.
GB: You know what, they are what creates a healthy city and they are the way in which we educate ourselves. But the fact is, the future of this city and of this region is in arts and creativity and the production of those arts and the dissemination of that creativity. (Mp3 at 14:50)

Sobera’s answer was wonderful, but I think it could have also been answered this way: ‘what’s the point of having health care and education if you’re going to spend your life bored?’

Daniel Richler once described Mike Harris and Ralph Klein as examples of educational failure, and since hearing him say that ³ I’ve always kept that in mind. The people who Marni Soupcoff is pandering to are educational failures. I don’t care what kind of credentials an MBA or the like amounts to if your indifference to the arts has become openly hostile, and if you’re prone to use words like ‘loser’ when thinking of them. If that’s the case, your education has been no such thing. If you managed to go to university, you paid for your job training and partially subsidized your voluntary lobotomization. An educated person can be indifferent to the arts, but they should at least recognize their value.

As I’ve written, I’m not that much of a fan of the arts-councils. But I support public funding of culture. I just think the process could use reformation. If the Canadian Council was able to fund Soupcoff to go on a self-education sabbatical during which she expose herself to what the best of human beings have been able to achieve, perhaps she might be grateful. However, you can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Or, as I’ve heard recently, ‘you can cure ignorance but you can’t cure stupid’.

I’d like to see politicians and journalists start pandering to this societies’ educated rather than to its stupid.

__________________
1. Chapterhouse Dune, 1985, p. 119
2. My position is that the democratic deficit is to blame for increasing violence: governance is disconnected from the citizens who want more social services and less military spending.
3. On the defunct CBC Friday night program out of Vancouver; name of which I don’t remember, circa 2002

From Goodreads 07w45:3:

November in Canada is a season of two contradictory impulses. The first is the Massey Lectures, a series of five one hour lectures delivered on CBC Ideas for a work-week sometime during this month. The Massey Lectures to me represent some of the better characteristics of our species: the desire to not only grow in knowledge, but to communicate it as well. This lecture series invites the so called expert to break down the professional linguistic barriers that too often separates them from a broad audience.

The Massey Lectures used to invite scholars and writers of international habitation, but since the mid-nineties have focused on Canadian speakers, highlighting how much excellent thinking is being done by Canadians. My own excessive fondness for the work of John Ralston Saul stems from his delivery of the 1995 Massey Lectures, and my support of Michael Ignatieff’s quest for the Liberal leadership (and the subsequent eventual likelihood of Prime Ministership) comes from his 2000 Lectures (and in that case, it wasn’t so much the content of his talks, which was on human rights, but the fact that Canada deserves to have a Prime Minster who’s intelligent enough to have delivered the talks in the first place). Other past notables of the Massey Lectures include Charles Taylor (who delivered the 1991 Lectures) and Northrop Frye (in 1962; the series The Educated Imagination I consider to be essential reading).

Prior to the can-con, Noam Chomsky taught us about the media-as-propaganda model in 1988, and Dorris Lessing taught us about ‘the prisons we live inside’ in 1985. Lessing’s lectures were re-published by the House of Anansi Press last year, just in time for this year’s Nobel win to spike sales, and I picked up my copy the other day.

This brings me to the other side of Canadian November, and that’s the poppy. This is the impulse which contradicts our desire for knowledge (that desire to grow as individuals and as a species) and that is the desire for barbaric violence. The poppy sentimentalizes what should be considered simply shameful. How can its motto of ‘lest we forget’ still be said after 90 years of more war after that ‘war to end all wars’? It’s shame should be apparent in this embarrassment.

This year I’ve decided to boycott this emblem of remembrance, because I’m tired of war, I’ve had an ear and eyeful from the news all year and I want nothing to do with it. I don’t support the troops, I think Western governance has gone on a patriarchal war-is-glory bender and whatever threats exist are only exaggerated to promote the real agenda, which is an ancient Roman ideal of glory in death, destruction, and the vanquishing of enemies. Fuck all of that.

In her first lecture twenty-two years ago, Lessing brought up the unspoken facet of violence and war which she had witnessed in her lifetime, and that was that war was for many people fun. She opens her talks with a tale of a farmer who’s expensively imported bull had killed the boy who took care of it, and that this farmer decided to kill the bull because in his mind it had done wrong. She also tells of the post-WW II symbolic trial and ‘execution’ of a tree that had been associated with General Petain. Lessing points out that the farmer’s actions, and the villagers who destroyed a tree, were irrational, acting out of symbolism but not sense. As she says, ‘I often think about these incidents: they represent those happenings that seem to give up more meaning as time goes on. Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly - and I am talking about human affairs in general - then it is as if suddenly some awful primitivism surges up and people revert to barbaric behavior.’ Later, she writes:

To return to the farmer and his bull. It may be argued that the farmer’s sudden regression to primitivism affected no one but himself and his family, and was a very small incident on the stage of human affairs. But exactly the same can be seen in large events, affecting hundreds or even millions of people. For instance, when British and Italian soccer fans recently rioted in Brussels, they became, as onlookers and commentators continually reiterated, nothing but animals. The British louts, it seems, were urinating on the corpses of people they had killed. To use the word ‘animal’ here seems to me unhelpful. This may be animal behavior, I don’t know, but it is certainly human behavior, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism. […] In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course there are others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that I think is not often talked about. (p.15-16)

It is my sense, as noted above, that the Western world has not grown out of the immaturity of its violent, Imperial and Roman past. It used to be the comparison between the United States and Rome was a metaphor, and it has now become an analogy. It can be argued that since the Renaissance the Western project has been the resurrection of the Roman political state.

There is a reason why Roman dramas are part of our televisiual schedules, and that the actors speak with English accents, and that reason is simply that to a contemporary audience at mid-20th Century, when these dramas began to be made, the English accent was associated with Empire, but we still have not shifted to Roman dramas of American accents. Perhaps that wouldn’t be ‘exotic’ enough. Perhaps because American Empire is Robert Duval saying he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, or a cowboy falling on a nuclear weapon, or Nicholson telling us we can’t handle the truth. A Roman drama with American accents wouldn’t work because we associate American Empire with a vulgar New World technological advantage and Ancient Rome still sounds better in an Old World voice.

Cue Dante. This is written as an introduction to the link below, a discussion on Dante’s Paradiso, a recent translation of which has just been published. I’ve tried to read the Paradiso more than once over the past few years and always find it extremely boring, and that’s part of my point. There is a reason why the dark, violent, Hell-Vision of Dante is more often translated, more often talked about, more often borrowed for a cinematic vision. Because we are still barbarians. Resurrecting Rome while still caught in a Dark Ages mind-set that likes all this violent shit. (Beowulf anyone?).

And yet, seven hundred years ago, in the midst of that Middle Age between the light of Empires, a man imagined Heaven. It has been said that this alone should be heralded, as a supreme accomplishment of the human imagination. And that is why I’ve tried to read and appreciate it. Because it represents something other than violence and darkness, and if we find it boring, it’s because we still allow ourselves to be thrilled by cruelty and brutality. We still pay money to see digital humans ripped apart by monsters, fake blood flying everywhere. The Romans had least had the balls to do it for real, they didn’t try to hide behind our ’special effects’ which somehow is supposed to do two things: maintain a moral vision of human worth (which is continually contradicted by the cruelties in the news) and prevent us from seeing the dubious morality of being entertained by violence.

And so, a conversation on Dante during the season of Ideas and poppies. - Timothy

The Case of MB
On 25 November 2006, a Montreal blogger posts the following on his site. Although many of us know exactly who the characters involved are, because of the subsequent legal action I’ve decided it’s best to remove the names. Our Montreal blogger will be referred to below as MB.

Howdy!

According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.

This might even be a better story than [C].

This was basically a link-out to an article in the National Post which had been published the day before. The article was about A, a car dealer who police claimed was involved with a crime family. Word on the street had it that B was a business partner with A, and that A had stolen paintings from B, as B is a gallery owner. B was actually in business with A’s wife, not A himself.

The subsequent legal action mentioned above was that B sued MB for defamation, because of the above post. Let’s read it again:

According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec.

According the National Post article, A was in business with B, and B tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. This relates to an even older story from 2003, and is of little consequence here. The defamation in question comes about in the following sentence:

Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.

By beginning his sentence with ‘Because of him’ the implication is that he’s referring to the last person named in the previous statement (B) when in fact he’s referring to A. This leads to the legal action, which is initiated in April, when Mr. MB received the first cease-and-desist notification, which apparently asked for the post to be corrected, clarified, or deleted.

My sense is that complying would have been reasonable, except that MB got his back up about it all and ended up deleting his blog. All because of an unclear sentence structure, and the use of the controversy for a relentless self-promotion campaign of interviews with mainstream media organizations.

Fueled by claims of censorship and a lack of free speech, the angle was always that of the little guy being bullied by people with enough money to afford to drag the matter before the courts. This publicity simply exacerbated the situation.

Again, this is simply the result of bad writing, and the real lesson here is not one of censorship, but that one should be clear about one’s references. MB was simply trying to summarize something that had been published by a national newspaper, but in doing so implied not only an association with the party being investigated by police, but the actual offenses supposedly perpetrated by that person. B had every right to ask for the posting to be clarified or deleted.

Email
A book has now been published as a manual for email, and in it’s review, Janet Malcolm quotes the following examples, described as the correspondence between an executive ‘at a large American company in China’ and his secretary:

You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support.

To which the secretary replied:

I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even though I’m your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it’s someone else’s fault.

Her reply was cc’d to everyone in the company. ‘Before long,’ write Malcolm, ‘the exchange appeared in the Chinese press and led to the executive’s resignation’.

I’m glad to see the executive ended up losing his position, not the secretary. But again, this is the result of bad writing. The executive was probably ignorant of the tone he was conveying with his sentences. His use of the word ‘you’ four times, and the condensation of his instructions into two sentences comes across as curt and unfeeling. The secretary reads it as such, and accuses him of being impolite.

The executive, having risen to the top of ‘a large American company’ must be well versed in the technocratic language of our time. His secretary made the reasonable assumption that he had the wherewithal to carry his own keys, and I’m making the assumption that he’s illiterate - not in the sense that he cannot read or write, but in the sense that he’s not conscious of the effect of his (or the) written word. But then again, one email is not enough to go on for that conclusion: he may have been having a bad day, he may have already been angry about something else, he may have had a company wide reputation for being an asshole to begin with and so on.

Another example from the review clearly implies the executive in question is an asshole:

In this case, the secretary spilled ketchup on the boss’s trousers, and he wrote an email asking for the £4 it cost to have the trousers cleaned (the company was a British law firm). Receiving no reply, he pursued the matter. Finally he—and hundreds of people at the firm—received this email:

Subject: Re: Ketchup trousers

With reference to the email below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.

I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.

Having already spoken to and shown your email…to various partners, lawyers and trainees…, they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the £4.

I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon. Jenny.

Considering my subject here is what is conveyed by writing, I want to point out that both of these examples convey that the top of the corporate pyramid is inhabited by less-than-human individuals, both male, and both wanting to defer responsibility to their female underlings. One could have clearly carried his keys, while the other could have clearly afforded to cover the cost of cleaning his pants. It is precisely this type of basic inconsideration which fuels the protests against globalized capitalism.

Do Not Consume
My third example comes from a story reported last spring, in which Health Canada attempted to warn people not to drink the water on certain Native reservations. (I’m disgusted by the need to write that sentence, btw: ‘bad water on native reservations’. What century am I living in?)

As reported on the CBC website in May:

Health Canada says it plans to revamp its communication strategy about drinking water in aboriginal communities after finding out that its warning ads are not working.Federal Health Minister Tony Clement said Thursday a study has found that its public service announcements, which come in the form of signs and posters, are not clear or effective.

“You live and learn in these things,” Clement said in Ottawa.

Because it was too hard to write, ‘Don’t drink the water’ (that would have been too human, too unprofessional) the signs were written thus:

Do Not Consume Advisory  ‘According to the study,’ (study!) CBC reported, ‘residents did not know if the sign referred to their tap water or if the advisory was just a suggestion’.This links back to the example of the executive in China. Corporate language has to be cold, unfeeling, imprecise, technical. The technical aspect is the most important, because it conveys the delusion that one is scientific, and as John Ralston Saul argued with Voltaire’s Bastards, we live within the social cult of Reason. Everything should be as emotionless as an equation.Saul wrote in The Unconscious Civilization (p. 48-49):

In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning, although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.

(Think of how MB is complaining of being censored, when he apparently couldn’t see how his sentence structure could be so misconstrued).

I would put it this way. Our language has been separated into two parts. There is public language - enormous, rich, varied and more or less powerless. Then there is corporatist language, attached to power and action.

(Do Not Consume Advisory)

Corproratist language itself breaks down into three types. Rhetoric, propaganda and dialect. [...] For the moment let’s concentrate on dialects. Not the old-fashioned regional dialects, but the specialized, inward looking verbal mechanisms (I’m avoiding the word language because they are not language; they do not communicate) of the tens of thousands of monopolies of fractured knowledge. These are what I would call the dialects of the individual corporations. The social science dialects, the medical dialects, the science dialects, the linguist dialects, the artist dialects. Thousands and thousands of them, purposely impenetrable to the non-expert, with thick defensive walls that protect each corporation’s sense of importance. [...]

The reliance on specialist dialects, indeed the requirement to use [them], has become a universal condition of our contemporary elites. …

But the core of the disease is perhaps to be found in the social sciences. These often well-intentioned, potentially useful false [emp mine] sciences feed the dialects of the public and private sectors. [...] Economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitate scientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but above all, through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects. As in business and governmental corporations, the purpose of such obscure language could be reduced to the following formula: obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance.

Obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance: Don’t Drink the Water.

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

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:

• “?ج�?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?ج�?speak and act straightforwardly?ج�?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.?ج�?

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?ɬ�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, whi