/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

[From Goodreads 08w14:4]

Honestly, if a business can’t afford to pay all its employees a livable wage, than that business should be considered a fail. What are businesses for? (The wrong answer is to say the enrichment of the owners at the expense of the employees, because that’s like Marxism or something, and we’re supposed to be past all that).

I remember when I was working for a minimum wage in Halifax, feeling both totally exploited and humiliated into enforced poverty. Further, the business had like 6 people on the payroll when it only really needed three. That’s where I got the idea that mismanagement should never be an excuse to pay people peanuts. And why I have no sympathy for the business owners who claim raising the minimum wage would be too hard on them. They’re not paying themselves a minimum wage are they?

My greater concern for raising the minimum wage is this society’s capacity to maintain an unfair status quo. As is pointed out in this article, adjusted for inflation, today’s Ontario minimum wage is equivalent to what it was thirteen years ago. I’ve noticed in the past that whenever the minimum wage goes up, so do the prices at Tim Hortons, (which I consider to be an unofficial index of inflation). So the gains of the working poor are immediately offset to erase them. The article begins by pointing out that the Ontario minimum wage went up last week. This week Tim Hortons had signs at its counters saying the prices of some menu items would rise next week. Two weeks ago, the Go Train commuter system rose its ticket prices too.

So, in 2010, when the minimum wage rises to $10 and hour, count on 1.60 coffees (rather than the current 1.42 lg) at your national coffee chain, and corresponding ticket prices across our belle province and sun-shiny country. - Timothy

08w08:1 Review & Preview: The Canadian Art Reel Artists Film Festival 21-24 Feb 2008

[Cross posted from Goodreads 08w08:1]

The Canadian Art Reel Artists Film Festival, 21-24 February 2008
http://www.canadianart.ca/foundation/programs/reelartists/2008/01/24/
http://www.canadianart.ca/microsites/REELARTISTS//schedule/
screening at the Al Green Theatre, Miles Nadal JCC
750 Spadina Ave (at Bloor), Toronto

In his as-yet-untranslated book Formes de Vie (1999) Nicolas Bourriaud makes the argument that Duchamp treated the gallery as a film camera, a box in which the gallery ‘recorded’ the work and in so doing made it art. Throughout the 20th Century, the dominance of film as a medium has seeped into our consciousness to such an extant that it seems that all art today works in cinematic terms. The spectacle, the grandeur, the big budgets … the gallery has become a film set and must borrow from the film-production’s capacity to make the impossible real. Take for example the open pits of crude oil shown in There Will Be Blood - accurately reflecting the lack of environmental concern of a century ago, and yet filmed in 2006 under conditions that were probably heavily controlled and legislated behind the scenes. Also consider something like Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, where the Tate gallery undertook intentional damage to the foundations of the building and displayed it with an aloofness which makes it seem no big deal.

But the ugliness of its construction is as hidden as that which goes into the manufacture of our consumer goods by foreign wage slaves. We are only asked to marvel at the gleam, and not think of the grime.

I raise this points as an introduction to the blending of the cinematic and locational art forms, which is annually celebrated by the Canadian Art Foundation’s film series of artist documentaries. This year’s selection have a common theme of monumentalism, and the documentaries give us insight and access to the grime behind the gleam of art-stardom. Having watched previews of most of the films in this year’s series, (I was provided with all but four of the series’ screeners) what follows are reviews and reflections on them.

Jeff Wall | Jeff Wall - Retrospective 58:42 dir. Michael Blackwood (2007)

Peter Galassi (L) and Jeff Wall (R)

This film is an hour long eavesdrop as Wall walks through his 2007 retrospective exhibition at MOMA with its co-curator Peter Galassi. The format makes it a little boring at times - but it’s worth it if you’re at all interested in his work, and Wall gives wonderful insights into what inspired his classic pieces. It can be said that he’s a painter using photography to make his images, which are so composed and choreographed to assume the one-off aspect of a painting, albeit made in a medium which ensures a maximum reproducibly. Looking at Wall’s backlit images I was reminded they are precursors of the digital photographs we are all getting used to. One imagines that many HD-flat screen panels will be used to display future photography, as luminous and well resolved as a Jeff Wall. It makes his work seem almost prescient in that regard, and makes the technology behind it seem merely primitive rather than gimmicky or even as sophisticated as it appeared ten years ago.

Philip Johnson | Philip Johnson: Diary of an Eccentric Architect 55:00 dir. Barbara Wolf (1996)

Philip Johnson and Rem Koolhaas in the rain

This film is essentially a grand tour of Johnson’s sprawling estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was used as a literal field of experimentation by the architect. Johnson gives tours of the projects he undertook on his land over fifty years, meanwhile the film documents the construction of one such experiment, a building inspired by Frank Stella (who comes to see the work in progress), and which when completed is visited under umbrella by Rem Koolhaas. Once painted, it looked magnificent. I appreciated the inclusion of a scene where the construction workers quarrel with the managers, who are quibbling over ten-grand. ‘Ten thousand dollars is a drop in a hat. I see your place over there, you’re not working for $25/hr with guys making $12/hr, and think you’re going to live on that’. This sentence encapsulates what’s wrong with startchitecture to begin with, and for me is the key-phrase of the film.

As we go forward, this documentary may become one of those historical curiosities in which the rich playboy gives a tour of his Versailles and the interconnected social and environmental repercussions are totally ignored. Johnson (who I’ve most often seen in a suit at the office commenting in documentaries on the work of other architects) here is seen as a full resolution person, who had lived a blessed life of success and had reached an age when he couldn’t help but take it all for granted. His personal art gallery, brilliantly designed to exhibit many large paintings in a small space, consists of work that he needs explained to him by an assistant who first appears in the film sitting in the gallery in such a way that I mistook him for a Duane Hanson. Had The Simpson’s Mr Burns been written as an architect, he would have been modeled on Philip Johnson, and this Mr Burns would return the affections of his Smithers.

Bas Jan Ader | Here is always somewhere else 70:00 dir. Rene Daalder (2006)

Bas Jan Ader died the year I was born, and yet he has the best artist website I have ever seen, the result of some benefactor buying up his estate in recent years. As a part of this media revival, Rene Daalder was asked to make this film by Ader’s widow. (The trailer can be seen on the Ader website here). This film was a little slow getting started but got more interesting near the half-way mark. One of the nice things about this feature is how Daalder revisits some of the locations Ader used for his art-films, which have been so transformed in the intervening years as to have become unrecognizable.

Featuring interviews with people inspired by Ader’s work, including Tacita Dean, we learn much about his background, and the similar background of Daalder, who attempts to tell Bas Jan’s story by giving us insight into his own. Before he too immigrated to Los Angeles, Daalder began as a film-maker in Holland (one of his early films’s stared Rem Koolhaas, thirty years before getting his rainy day tour at Philip Johnson’s) before leaving after his first ‘most-expensive Dutch film ever’ failed at the domestic box-office. The result is a story of a small group of Dutch expatriates who ended up in L.A. trying and make their fame and fortune in Hollywood. With the exception of Koolhaas, they succeeded while remaining obscure. For example, one of the actors in another early Daalder film was Carel Struycken who I was familiar with as Mr. Homn, Lexanna Troi’s butler from the Star Trek episodes I watched as a teenager, and who also starred in the Adam’s Family movie as Lurch.

Wikipedia states that Ader’s work began to be revived in the early 1990s, and I first learned about him through the Phaidon Conceptual Art book, published in 1998. Richard Rorty described genius as the coincidence of one’s personal obsession meeting a public need. Throughout the 1980s, Bas Jan Ader was to a small group of Dutch men just that friend who disappeared at sea. As one says early on in the film, ‘I didn’t know I was friends with a myth’. This myth was constructed in the early 1990s, which is to say that the public need for Ader’s obsession only began then, this public being an art-world increasingly interested in the type of work Ader produced. As a video artist, his work can be seen throughout the movie (and on his website), and on the one hand it can seem both boring and absurd (what’s up with all the falling?) but on the other it can seem interesting and profound (the sea captain who had thought about it a lot). Ader’s work is a reminder to artists that there’s an potential audience for anything, but it may take twenty years after your death for the public’s interest to coincide with your obsessions.

Richard Serra | To See is to think 44:33 dir. Maria Anna Tappeiner (2006)

In Sheila Heti’s interview with Dave Hickey, he says of Richard Serra that ‘he’s totally not hip, can’t speak without drawing’. Throughout this film Serra is seen carrying a sketchbook, and only once to we see him actually using it. I’ve often thought that Serra’s work will survive for as long as there’s no iron shortage, but give us another couple of hundred years of material squandering, and then will see if this stuff is really worth something as art. Serra’s obsession with drawing allows one to see his sculpture really as a drawing in itself - only he is marking three dimensional space with the material of steel, rather than working with graphite or charcoal on two-dimensions. This image illustrates this for me: a simple line drawing, highlighting the space of the sky, consisting of one of Serra’s steel sheets seen edge-wise. (Of course, this interpretation is aided by the framing offered by the film camera).

Serra’s work makes me question wether things like Stonehenge were really about the stars and the Equinoxes. Perhaps they too liked to mark space with massive objects? I hope that Serra’s work, if it survives future material scarcity, will never be interpreted as astrological charting. That would make our culture look unimaginative. It’s worth persevering the memory of these rusted pieces of steel as attempts to mark the landscape in a creative way, although here I’m again reminded of what bothered me about Johnson’s estate. The land was fine as it was, and along came some egotistical human set about ‘improving’ it by dumping a hunks of rusted metal in it. I don’t think we’ve (as a culture) quite figured out the balance between imagination and destruction.

Anish Kapoor | Art in Progress: Anish Kapoor 27:24 dir. John Wyver (2007)

Anish Kapoor discussing the maquette for his installation of Svayambh

This documents the Kapoor retrospective which opened three months ago (Nov 2007) in Germany. Kapoor is one of the bigger names in sculpture right now, but he’s another reminder that artists these days (when they are successful) make big work that highlights vulgar industrial excess (a block of red wax weighing 45 tons and measuring 10 x 4.5 x 3.5 meters. WTF?) and it’s all ok because there’s enough money in the world, it’s affordable to these aristocrats, and besides, what else are we going to do with 45 tons of red wax? Cover cheese with it?

Kapoor emphasizes that his work is about color. The monumentalism of its material just seems like a paradoxical cheap trick: an expensively produced contrivance. Like, this is what it takes to awe people today - not fragility, not the delicate, but the heavy metal (Serra) in your face ear-bleeding loud message. The red wax is awe-some because it’s big.

In a world where the British-American Empire is guilty of war crimes while we face environmental catastrophe, this type of work just pokes my cynicism. When the process is supposed to be an important part of the work, and when that process is fictionalized (as it appears to be in this case) than what is the work but bullshit? Asking me to imagine the process just renders such installations as the set-design for an unmade film that it so often appears to be these days. With that in mind, I’d much rather walk through the set of the now-filming Star Trek movie than look at a giant block of red wax smeared against a gallery’s wall. Then again, if I saw this is person I might disagree with what I’ve just written.

Sam Wagstaff | Black White + Grey: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff 72:15 dir. James Crump (2007)

As Philippe Garner (Director of Photography at the London Christie’s) says near the end of this documentary, ‘It horrifies me to think that there’s a generation growing up now in photography that doesn’t know who Sam is. And yet his legacy permeates the field, there’s absolutely no doubt about that.’

Featuring an extensive appearance by Patti Smith, roommate of Maplethorpe and part of the relationship wherein Maplethorpe took advantage of his wealthy sugar-daddy Sam Wagstaff, this is also a reminiscence of the New York 1970s art-scene and gay-demi-monde. What I most appreciated learning was that Wagstaff was responsible for a vast bulk of the collection of Getty Images.

There was some structural problems with this film’s editing, near the middle it became too crowded with interviews and from that point began to seem incongruous. Nevertheless a nice history of a man who helped change the direction of art through his curation and who amassed one of the most important photo collections in the world.

Phyllis Lambert | Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture 52.00 dir. Teri Wehn-Damisch (2006)

One scene of this I recognized as something I’d seen on TVO’s Masterworks last year - a scene where Phyllis Lambert-neé Brofman is walking through a Mies van der Rohe building and showing disgust at the curtains put up in its lobby. If I remember correctly, that scene was originally from a Mies-centered documentary. One of the fellow-architects interviewed for this portrait of Lambert (ridiculously modeled on Citizen Kane for god-knows-what reason) stated that architecture as we know it today would not have been without Lambert, primarily because when her family wanted to build their corporate phallic symbol in New York, she reviewed the initial design and convinced them to hire Mies instead, the result being the Seagram building. This resulted in a collaboration between Mies and Phillip Johnson, reputations established and architectural history writ. Considering how devastating architecture has become (the renegade architect Christopher Alexander having declared most of it ‘insane’) Lambert’s role is either a good thing or a bad thing considering which side your on.

Rodin | Rodin: The Sculptor’s View 53:00 dir. Jake Auerbach (2006)

Interviews with contemporary sculptors on the legacy of Rodin. This is really for sculpture geeks. Featuring Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Rebecca Warren, Barry Flanagan, Tony Cragg, Anthony Carro and Richard Deacon. (I just copied that from the blurb, incase those names spark any interest on your part. Honestly, this one I found the least interesting, since I’m not a sculpture geek. It’s just sculptors talking shop, with requisite cinematic close ups of Rodin’s work).

Tickets and times for the screenings available at the links listed above.

From Goodreads 07w49:4

Figure 1. A 22nd Century Bridged City
The above is actually from an episode of the Star Trek series Enterprise. It came to my attention the other day through a montage depicting history in another episode of the series. As fans of the show know, one of the running plots involved time travel, and the depiction of human history ‘resetting itself’ (after plot related meddling) was done through the use of images from various sources grouped together into thematically recognizable decades. So the 1980s were depicted by images of Ronald Regan, Margaret Thatcher, and Ruhollah Khomeini, the 1990s by images of the Clintons, George H Bush shaking the hand of Mikhail Gorbachev, etc. After the depictions of the first half the present decade (scenes of 9/11, Bush & Blair) it moves on into speculation. (The images from the stream are available here). The future was represented by a car and a robot and from then onto scenes of the show’s 22nd Century, marked by the opening shot of the series, the launch of the Enterprise spaceship, in the year 2151 (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Cpt Archer in the Timestream

The 22nd Century is therefore marked by two cityscapes, one being that of Figure 1 the other being the following. These are meant to be Earth cities given the context of the time stream, but both shots are re-used production art from previous episodes. As I’ve mentioned, the cityscape below is from a Season 1 show (’Dear Doctor’), while the bridge above is from an episode of Star Trek Voyager’s last season (’Workforce Part 1′).

Figure 3. Toronto, 2110 AD

With regard to Figure 3, because it is otherwise unlabeled and supposed to depict an Earth city in the 22nd Century, I thought it might as well be Toronto. We can imagine this stretch of waterfront as being a bit to the East, or a bit to the West, of the CN Tower thus accounting for its absence (or, I could just invite anyone to Photoshop it in). We can imagine the bridges are subway extensions to the island, and we see that a similar subway/covered LRT path runs right along the water.

This being an image originally from s-f, it reflects the current architectural trends of the beginning of the 21st Century, the postmodernist appreciation of angles, glass and concrete.

But I present this image to you thus as a reflection of what kind of city we’ll get if this century is to be one of starchitects. This is what another hundred years of Frank Gehry and Daneil Leibskinds will result in.

Does this city look like a place you’d want to live? We can spy green-space but it seems very sparse. And don’t give me the old, ‘who cares I’ll be dead’ routine, so common from the likes of the Baby Boomers. It’s precisely that type of attitude which has gotten us our present shit world, and I don’t want to encourage more of that. Given the extension of our lifespans over the past century, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that this could be the city of your elder years, so take the question seriously: is this where you want to hobble and feed pigeons? Further, are you so selfish as to be that uncaring about the type of environment our proverbial great-and-beyond-grandchildren will live in?

Figure 4. Caprica City, from the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries (2003)

A much more dramatic depiction of the type of city we could end up with it that from Battlestar Galactica. Filmed in Vancouver, perhaps one could label this ‘Vancouver 2210 AD’ since it seems a bit more harsh than the aesthetic presented above, as if one needed another century to get both the flying cars and the brutal deadness of the civic space:

Figure 5. Caprica City Detail

The real nightmare of urban development is this uniform cityscape of similar buildings, all equally unadorned, apparently utilitarian, with a neglected use of green space.

As spaces designed on computers to provide semiotic scenes meant to convey an advanced technological civilization, these reflect in turn the imagined futures of our own civilization. This is what we could end up with. But, in all likelihood, my guess is that the 22nd Century will not look like any of these images.

When Martin Rees published his book Our Final Hour in 2003, he famously gave our ‘civilization as we know it only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century.’ (quote source) Now there’s some ambiguity there: others predict the potential extinction of humanity, which would certainly ruin our civilization, but it could also anticipate a sort of apocalyptic collapse into another form of Mad Max Dark Ages. But I have to point out the civilization known to the British in 1903 - and globally, that of every other nation and ethnic group on the planet (with the exception of those still living isolated tribal lifestyles) did not survive the 20th Century. The British Empire fell, the reliance on coal was replaced with that of processed crude oil, and the colonial projects of the era came to ignominious ends - the consequences of which we are still processing. Given how squanderous of natural resources our present civilization-as-we-know-it is, there’s no reason to want it to survive the 21st Century.

Which brings me to Prince Charles, who by the times spoken of here will be thought of as King Charles III. In the early 1980s, Charles was mocked by the media for his interest in organic farming, and he’s currently thought of as daft for his architectural interests, including his sponsorship of the community of Poundbury. Poundbury is the result of Charles’ interest in the work of Leon Krier and Christopher Alexander. As the Poundbury website records:

Poundbury is a mixed urban development of Town Houses, Cottages, Shops & Light Industry, designed for the Prince of Wales by Architect Leon Krier on the outskirts of the Dorset County Town of Dorchester. Prince Charles, The Duke of Cornwall, decided it was time to show how Traditional Architecture and Modern Town Planning could be used in making a thriving new community that people could live & work in close proximity. Poundbury has now become World Famous as a model of urban planning, with regular visits from Councillors and MPs. Welcome to the Poundbury Community Website!

Given how Charles has already displayed some prescience when it came to organic agriculture, anticipating both its sense and its popularity, my expectation is that he’s once again onto something with his interest in such small-scale, community oriented architecture. The end result will be cityscapes of the 22nd Century which will not reflect the imagined exaggerations of the present shown to us through easy digital mock-ups.

I return now to the city of the bridge. When I saw this in the Timestream montage, the lines of it brought to mind the position just stated: that by the 22nd Century, technological advance combined with a rejection of explicit postmodernist, angular, and Leibskind-like egotism will brings us a meld of the tradition and the technological. The bridged city seemed a place inspired by Lord of the Rings, a technological version of Rivendell.

Figure 6. Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Figure 7. Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Figure 8. A bridge in Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Figure 9. Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Given a choice between Caprica, or the Toronto of 2110 suggested here, I’d take a Rivendell of any season, of any weather condition. Of course, I expect to be able to continue to use a high speed internet connection, use a cell-phone, browse in an Apple Store, and be able to have sushi. The point here is we can take much more control over our built environment, and expect more from our architects than glass and concrete. Letting current architectural fashion guide the next several generations will only result in a Caprica like monstrosity.- Timothy

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

(from Goodreads)

This Goodreads is in part of confession of ignorance, and how wonderful things can be when you don’t have the full picture. Which is to say, they’re fantastic when not dulled by the acquired cynicism of ‘an inside story’. And perhaps it is by coming to the experience initially ignorant, having that wonderful first impression, that the further nuance associated with it doesn’t diminish its glow.

Two of the items discussed here refer to art exhibitions on in Toronto presently, which is to encourage any of you for whom it is possible to visit them.

These four fantastics are presented in the order in which I experienced them.

I. Fantastic One | Darren O’Donnell at CCL1

Darren O’Donnell’s work over the past couple of years has been fantastic. His Suicide Site Guide to the City wowed me when I saw it in 2005, and apparently this was because of the ignorance mentioned above, as Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote in his review at the time ‘…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation’. I admitted in my review that I was one of such an audience. Yet, how could we not appreciate Haircuts by Children or Ballroom Dancing for Nuit Blanche?

In an arts scene riven by competition and jealousies, Darren’s work is something that we all seem to appreciate without such pettiness. I recently attended the latest production from his theatre company, Diplomatic Immunities: THE END and was genuinely touched: Ulysses Castellanos singing Queen’s `We are the Champions` at the end of the show almost made me cry. This was the song voted on by children at a local school to be that which they wanted to hear at the End of the World. (My vote at the present time is either The Beatles’ `Tomorrow Never Knows` or `Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)` and as I listen to them nowadays I imagine it playing over the footage of this video.)

But what is it about Darren’s work along these lines that is so generally fantastic? For me it highlights what is perhaps a greater shift in our culture, which is a movement toward an interest in ‘real life’ (and to that end, reality-tv represents this transition, by using non-actors but still tying them to some sort of narrative structure). The work of Darren’s theatre troupe, Mammalian Diving Reflex, forgoes an explicit narrative structure and seemingly let’s that emerge on it’s own.

Here, I’m most inspired by a snippet of dialogue from a Star Trek show. In the Enterprise episode ‘Dear Doctor’ which first aired in January 2002, there’s a scene depicting movie-night on the starship; while watching ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ a 1943 film being shown in that time-frame of 209 years from its creation, the character Ensign Cutler asks the alien Doctor Phlox, ‘They don’t have movies where you come from do they?’ He replied, ‘We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discovered their real lives were more interesting’.

Now, imagine living on Phlox’s planet during that time of transition, when people were discovering their own lives were more interesting. Wouldn’t that time resemble our own, with diminishing box office returns, reality-tv programing undermining celebrity culture, a global communications network allowing for unedited dialogue within varying degrees of privacy, and the rise of the documentary genre in popularity?

This statement was typed out initially by a scriptwriter in Los Angeles at the beginning of this decade and perhaps was meant both as an inside joke to Star Trek’s fanbase (Shatner’s ‘Get a Life‘ skit from his 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live) and reflecting the concern of Hollywood that they would lose their market. Three years later, Enterprise was cancelled, the only franchise since its resurrection twenty years ago to not last through seven seasons.

Leaving DI: The End four weeks ago I was convinced that our own lives were definitely more interesting. The performance incorporated an element of chance in its selection of two audience members during the course of the evening for interviews by the cast and attendees; on the night I was there, I was stunned by the answers given by the second girl chosen, who told us of saving the life of one of her friends during a climbing accident years before. Also, when asked a question along the lines of ‘why are we here’ she gave such an unexpectedly Buddhist/Eastern Tradition answer that I found myself saying ‘wow’.

The point made for me was that this girl, who had simply been someone sitting in the aisle in front of me, had a much more dramatic world inside her than anything I’m ever offered by fictional constructions, and I took this knowledge onto the street, walking with my companion who was someone new in my life and hence still full of mystery, and saw everyone around me with a new appreciation for our variety, our potential, and of the unknown masterpieces of real life.

This past Thursday, I attended Darren’s opening at The Centre of Leisure and Culture No. 1, Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India which consists of an approximately twenty-minute video and chapbooks of the blog Darren kept while on tour in Pakistan and India late last year. I’ve prompted Darren to place this video online eventually, and if and when that happens I’ll follow through with the link.

At the time of Darren’s trip, I was moved to contact CBC’s The Current because I’d recently heard an interview (begins at 7:45min) with the 24 year old Afghani woman Mehria Azizi who was doing a tour through Canada showing a documentary she’d made about women’s lives in her homeland. This had been one of the more insightful things I’d been exposed to with regard to this part of the world. I imagined Anna Maria Tremonti asking Darren about his conversation with Mike the soldier on the plane, or asking for stories from Darren’s experience with the humanity of these people. I figured it would have fit into The Current’s mandate as I understood it: to educate, to inform, to bring us perspective. Darren’s work deserved this national audience. There was a bit of a followup from someone who was going to forward the info to a producer but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, due to the unreliableness of the CBC’s internet stream, and what I see as too much focus on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, I’ve avoided listening to The Current at work for the past couple of months, preferring instead France Culture or the BBC. I did catch the broadcast the other day of their self-flagellation on under and mis-reporting the story of Global Warming. Anna Maria was somewhat bothered by a statement of one of the scientists: ‘never underestimate the illiteracy of reporters’.

The following morning, (that of March 9th) the CBC included in its news roundup the visit by Canada’s Governor General to the troops in Afghanistan, and there was something said about ‘putting a human face’ on the story (mov and realmedia). What’s unfortunate is that Michaëlle Jean, who in the past has seemed an intelligent, well informed woman, was responsible for the stupidest statements in the report. ‘There’s no future without women …’. No shit. But perhaps the real fault lies with the editors of the video, or the fact that she used to be a reporter.

The evening before I’d been to Darren’s show to see the Pakistan video, the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit. My understanding of the situation and of the people involved has been greatly enhanced by Darren’s first-person and personal reporting and the fact that the CBC found him fit only for their hipster-oriented Definitely Not the Opera kind of suggests how little they take his work seriously … something silly for the kids right?

II. Fantastic Two | Monks in the lab

I watched/listened to this video on Friday at work, and it was fantastic. I especially liked the idea that the effect of mediation was to practice (and thus grow new neurons) paying attention to autonomic processes, which allows us to have greater awareness of our emotions and perceptions, so that we do not need to find ourselves ‘out of control’ or ’swept away’ by strong impulses. In my dream of the future, I want children to be taught meditation in kindergarten, as an essential life skill, just as much as doing your physical exercises and learning your maths.

Monks in the Lab | Buddhist Media.com

( Real Player Broadband Link)

( Real Player Narrowband Link/)

( Windows Media Player)

III. Fantastic Three | Zin Taylor at YYZ

As I’ve noted about Darren’s work, that it seems to miraculously inspire more admiration than jealousy, the work of Zin Taylor could be accused of inspiring more jealousy than admiration. Consider the facts as they appear: part of the Guelph university educated elite clique, he gets to be in show after show in prestigious galleries with work that is sometimes weak (the piece at The Power Plant in 2005 for example) and Taylor’s continual presence in the Toronto art scene PR seems to be attempting to break the record established by Derek Sullivan. Both artists appear to have been elevated to that collection of what seems like the less than ten artists who are overexposed in Toronto and who are continually asked to ‘represent’ this city of millions to others and to itself.

And so it was with ambivalence that I went down to the YYZ opening on Friday night; a chance to drink beer, be social, see some people I like to talk to and consider friends, and be ignored by those who used to say hi to me but now just think I’m an asshole or something. I wasn’t at all expecting Taylor’s video to win me over as it did, and it is now on my highly recommended list.

And yet, my appreciation for this work was based on my ignorance of its subject matter. I recall seeing years ago the call for submissions from the Yukon asking for artists to come on up and be inspired. I also recall hearing that Allyson and Zin, two artists I’d recently met through a friend, had been chosen to go. And so I knew over the past few years that Allyson and Zin had a connection to the Yukon and that they were making work about it.

With Put your eye in your mouth (which a friend suggested meant ‘digest what you see’) Zin has made a sort of fake documentary on a fake thing: Martin Kippenberger’s metro-net station in Dawson City. Now, my ignorance here was based on being familiar with Kippenberger’s name but not his work, so when watching the video, I thought Zin had seen this structure and made up an elaborate history for it, tying it to some art-star’s name in order to get in the trendy props to the masters. Turns out the Metro-Net was legit (also here), and yet this only diminishes by a bit the overall video, which is still fantastic. It is this type of elaborated imagination that I want to experience with art, and in as much that conceptual art usually goes for obscure one-liner cleverness, I hate it for its denial of the imagination. Now, considering Taylor’s background from Canada’s new conceptual It-School, I suppose I can say he’s showing that you can be both conceptual and imaginative, and the product is better for it.

IV. Fantastic Four | Kuchma’s Thrush Holmes reviews

The suspicions I had of Zin Taylor’s elaborate imagining of what could have been ‘the mine-shaft entrance’ follows on January’s suspicions that the opening of Thrush Holmes Empire was part of an elaborate joke.

There’s been talk in the scene of it being some kind of hoax, and personally I thought this was the case. I was trying to keep my mouth shut about it all, not wanting to ruin it, but now that I’ve been assured that this is not a masterpiece-parody on the art world constructed by Jade Rude and Andrew Harwood (the co-directors of the Empire space) (’they’re not that clever’ I was told), I guess I share my disappointment that this really is the work of a presumptuous and pretentious young man who makes terrible work. As I said at the opening in January, ‘if this work is a parody, it’s a masterpiece, but if it’s legit I feel sorry for the guy’. In other words, in my ignorance, I imagined a fantastic scenario in which Jade and Andrew had collaborated on making quick, easy, and lazy work to fill up wall space in time for the opening, and hired an actor to play Thrush Holmes (which plays too close to the great 90’s indie-rock band Thrush Hermit). No mother names their son Thrush, so whoever this guy is, his wallet certainly doesn’t contain ID linking him closely with Joel Plaskett’s 90s project.

(A Thrush Hermit Aside

Seeing Ian McGettigan cover The Wire’s ‘I am the Fly’ in 1999 was part of the reason I gave up watching live music once I moved to Toronto - nothing would ever top that, and I prefer to have my indie-music memories packaged around my experience in Halifax rather than have continued on with the ringing ears of today’s stuff. Even though that meant I missed out on seeing the shit like this live).

The only person who seems to be addressing this Thrush Holmes issue is Michael Kuchma.

As I mentioned in the last Goodreads, I was part of a panel discussion at Toronto’s Gallery 1313 on art criticism. I had a good time and it was well attended despite being both a Monday and the weather being less than conducive to a social gathering. (The event was recorded and will potentially be made available as a podcast, and if/when that happens I’ll send out a link). During the Q&A, I was asked a question from a fellow in the audience who later identified himself via a comment on the BlogTo blurb writen by fellow panelist Carrie Young the day after.

Michael Kuchma is trying to write some thoughtful criticism about the Toronto scene and I glad that I was able to learn about it through these circumstances. I appreciate his take not only on the Thrush Holmes stuff but also on the Toronto scene in general, and I also appreciate seeing the influence of the panel talk in his writing: I guess it was worth something in in the end.

In the second link (’why we Should…’) make note of point number 3:

Perhaps some fear that Holmes is orchestrating a brilliant art-stunt, and that passing judgment right now puts one in the vulnerable position of looking stoooopid and hasty on the day when Holmes comes clean with his Machiavellian master plan.

This is pretty much why I’ve kept quiet for this long, not wanting to ruin for everybody, and wanting to see Garry Michael Dault embarrassed for ‘falling for it’ as he had a positive review in the Globe & Mail on the day after the opening. (Why would I like to see Dault with egg on his face? Because Dault’s work as a critic is worthless - his reviews are almost always positive, unless he dares insinuate that someone has skills, at which point they are dismissed as being ‘illustrative’). A hoax or not, Kuchma’s thoughts on the whole matter are the most substantial I’ve come across and I’m glad he’s putting them out there.

Seenster | Michael Kuchma
http://t-dawt-seenster.blogspot.com/

Thrush Homes Walks a Razor Thin Line | Michael Kuchma (Feb 28 2007)
http://www.goodreads.ca/shorty/blogspot/seenster1/

Why we SHOULD talk about Thrust Holmes | Michael Kuchma (March 7 2007)
http://www.goodreads.ca/shorty/blogspot/seenster2/

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

Mr. Mee by Andrew Crumey (2000)

Proust has already come up twice - first in Taylor’s discussion, but also it the title of the Gordon Bell presentation. What better way to introduce Mr. Mee? The truth is I wanted to publish a review of Mr. Mee in the summer of 2005, and it is a novel I read in the summer of 2004, but obviously didn’t get around to it until now. Mr. Mee is a novel of three story-lines, with two of the major players being Rousseau and Proust; Rousseau as a character, and Proust as an idea. It is set a decade ago, in 1997, during the early years of the internet - which is an important element to the fiction. The eponymous character of Mr. Mee is a retired, naive academic who buys a computer in order to use the nascent World Wide Web to try and track down an obscure book. In a Borgesian allusion, Rosier’s Encyclopaedia has been referenced in the bibliography of a book he brought home from a leisurely afternoon at the used bookstore.

Andrew Crumey shifts the scene to tell us more about the Encyclopaedia by bringing us back to 18th Century Paris, and introducing us to two characters, Ferrand and Minard, two down-on-their-luck copyists who are commissioned to copy a bunch of nutty writings by a Mr. Rosier. F & M are named after two people who Rousseau wrote about in his autobiography, and Crumey’s speculation on their backstory, and its consequences were outstanding. This novel is simply intellectually delightful in that regard. Perhaps they had something to do with Rouseau’s famed paranoia? Maybe they thought Rousseau a murderer? And perhaps their paranoia was fueled by their work fair-copying this work of an 18th Century genius who’d thought up 20th Century quantum physics and binary computers in 18th Century terms? (One of my favorite parts of the book describes Minard’s construction of a digita-binary computer out of string and bits of paper, and he is heard to complain about needing more memory. It seems that even in the 1760s, it was desirable to have more RAM).

In the 1990s, a professor lies in a hospital bed, contemplating his life over the past several months, and the possibility of his death. He had been a professor of Proust, and had come to teach this work of autobiographical literature after an adolescent infatuation with the work of Rousseau. And so, as he writes his memoir, he reflects both on Rousseau and on Proust. This is the tour-de-force of the novel. I found this the most satisfying, and appreciated it’s intricate subtleties. The professor comes across as just another dime-a-dozen mediocre academic who live their quotidian lives a students and commentators of past human achievement. The Proust-bug has not yet bitten me, and it was here I learned of how Proust described his magnum opus as being ‘about an I who isn’t I’. The introduction of this thought in the professor’s memoir raises the question of how much of his text is about an I that isn’t he. The overall impression is that, faced with impending death, Dr. Petrie has at last given it a try, written his work of autobiography about and I who isn’t I, inspired by his mastery of knowledge of these two masters of the art. Dr. Petrie ignores whatever sense of failure that has brought him to this point - the broken heart, his cancer, the sense that it was his attempt to initiate an affair with a student which brought on the illness. Instead of being cowed by a sense of mediocrity in comparison to his literary heroes, he gives it a go and in so doing constructs a literature of the self. The added poignancy comes from the embarrassed recounting of the infatuation which he blames for the illness out of a sort of hubris, and it is perhaps through this honest memory that his work becomes literary and becomes the final accomplishment of his life.

And perhaps here it is worth remembering that a year ago, James Frey was in the news for his book of autobiography, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone who claims to run a book club to not understand the need to embellish, to lie, to cheat the details as (what used to be called in a more literate age) poetic license.

Crumey’s skill is seen in his ability to weave together the tale of naive Mr. Mee, the octogenarian centre of the story, with the dying professor and the story of Rouseau’s Minard and Ferrand, and in the process, imagine 20th Century theoretical physics in 18th Century terms, remind us of what the internet