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Tuesday 18 February 1986

Good day. Not much homework, just math. Finally found sweatshirt that had lost. Finished last night’s homework this morning.

Monday 17 February 1986

Good day but lots of homework. At end of day terrible. I didn’t want to do it. Saw end of movie.¹

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1. Didn’t want to do my homework, whatever that was. Probably math or French. Movie referred to was The Never Ending Story

Sunday 16 February 1986

Went to see Grandpa in I.C.U. Every time I saw him sleeping z-z-z. Had good diner. Got home at 9 pm

Saturday 15 February 1986

Made Lego boat. Named it “Missile Man” Had miny lauchment. We thought Grandpa might die that night.¹ Made a spare on Bowling.²

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1.I built this boat out of Lego, wrote ‘Missile Man’ on a peice of paper, which I taped to it’s bow. I playfully held a launch with some lego bottle or something. I remember playing with this while Airwolf was on tv. During the time my mother got a phone call; one of the relatives in Kentville calling in with a report on my ill Grandfather’s condition.
2. I used to bowl on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t enjoy it too much, as waiting around for my turn I found boring.

A reflection on offensive images in the news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Maze in The Shinning

Friday 14 February 1986

Valentines! Had fun at party. Movie was great!¹ Didn’t see it all of it.² I think I told D³ off.

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1.The movie (as previously mentioned) was The Never Ending Story which we watched on video as part of our Valentine’s day ‘party’ which meant time off of class and probably some sweets. I recall that The Never Ending Story excited both my imagination and touched me emotionally. At the time I had a total crush on the Princess, who I learned via Google is named Tami Stronach and is now a dancer in New York City. Now I look at her image from the time and see nothing more than a child, who was 2 years older than I was, and I find it strange to think I once imagined love based on this kid.
2. School ended before the movie did. We watched the rest at a later date.
3. D was the older brother of one of my classmates, who used to bully me. ‘Telling him off’ only meant that I stood up to him.

Last week saw a lot of coverage in mainstream media about the protests over some stupid drawings. In the Saturday (11 Feb) Globe and Mail, the editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon argued that they weren’t showing them because they didn’t feel they added anything important to the story, while justifying the occasional photo of bombed bodies on Israeli buses. (In that case I’m thinking of a 2003 front page). He wrote:

‘As one cartoonist said earlier this week, this is not a matter of self-censorship. It is a question of editing. Every day we are faced with similar decisions, particularly in choosing photos. Do we show a naked woman? Do we show a dead baby? Do we show bodies blown apart by a suicide bomber or other samples of the carnage that come our way regularly? Most often the answer is we do not. Only when we feel an offensive photo is absolutely necessary to the understanding of the story do we loosen our restraints.’

This point makes no sense, given that a full understanding of protests about drawings should require that one see them for oneself. I could take the mainstream media’s self-righteousness seriously if this were not the age of the internet and Google. You want to see ‘em, go ahead and see them. The same goes for pictures of naked women (naked men aren’t offensive?) dead babies, and carnage (orgish.com?). The media has used arguments of self-censorship and editing to draw us a picture of their own obsolesce.I’ve been wondering about how many people have actually seen the images on the net. As that’s part of what Goodreads is about, I almost sent the link a week ago but on the other hand, I didn’t want to be part of the game of offending people. I’ve been wishing this story would just go away like they always do. Remember two years ago when Mel Gibson was supposedly an anti-semite?

Yet I can relate to being offended by images. In 2002 John Paul II came to Toronto for the World Youth Day and I went and saw him give Mass, since I grew up a Catholic and had seen his photograph at my grandmother’s house for as long as I could remember, in addition to it being very popular in the area. There was a feeling of obligation, mixed with nostalgia I suppose. The night before the Mass, I went to an opening at Art System, the Ontario College of Art and Design student run gallery. Their show was about the Pope, and extended to Catholicism in general. As you can imagine, there were plenty of images of priests and popes sodomizing young boys. For one of the few times in my life, I was offended, but I knew where it was coming from (the rebellious young influenced by the scandals in the news) and having grown up in an open and tolerant society, felt no need to staple a placard to a stick and lead a protest, considering it was all just stupid and immature.

Now, one of the arguments with these Muhammed cartoons is that the editors of the newspaper should have known better. These Muslims are rioting and protesting because they feel insulted. I find it all kind of crazy that some people can get all upset over drawings, but as a visual artist I suppose I’m supposed to get all excited by the power of the medium and jump on the iconographic bandwagon, or get on the side of the cartoonists and talk about freedom of expression and denounce this iconoclasm. But I feel I have better things to do. The World has better things to do.

The editors of newspapers in North America would know better than to publish the images I saw from OCAD. They would be able to see how unfair they were. I’m not sure if that’s censorship, as much as it’s a respect for context. I can well imagine the images published elsewhere - in a show catalogue, in some article critiquing or analyzing the Church’s pederast scandals, in some art history book. The show didn’t warrant getting shut down by the cops, which still happens sometimes. There were no protests.

In this case, the cartoons violate Islam’s prohibition against images, and especially the prohibition in depicting the Prophet. Worse, the arguments made against the images by Muslim spokespeople are that they stereotype Muslims as terrorists. The image by Claus Seidel seems aimed to offend by merely representing Muhammed, whereas the image by Erik Sorensen seems to be as juvenile and ignorant as the shit I saw that night at OCAD.

Further, I have a recent example of being offended by an image. And the image in question is that of an ad featuring Ann Coulter and Robert Novak, featured prominently next to the cartoons here. This webpage thus manages to offend not only Muslims, but secular liberals. And, when I ask myself, ‘why do they keep protesting?’ I’m reminded by Coulter, who recently referred to them as ‘ragheads’.

The best explanation for what’s happened over the past week (advanced by Rick Salutin and reported by Simon Tudiver in Maisonneuve’s Mediascout) is that Muslims are pissed off for always being stereotyped and caricatured as terrorists, from these stupid cartoons to Hollywood’s blockbusters. Tudivier’s headline, by the way, ‘Protesting the cartoon professor’ refers to Peter March, who posted the images on the door of his office at Saint Mary’s University. Peter March was a professor of mine in 1998. After Tudivier raises the Salutin article, he adds, ‘Had Professor March offered up such an idea, MediaScout would have applauded his contribution. We should be looking to our academics to elevate the debate, not debase it by merely inciting an angry mob.’ What’s unclear in the reportage about Prof. March was that he teaches philosophy, and I think it’s fair to suggest that, instead of merely trying to incite an angry mob (as he waded into a protest on campus last week), he was trying to engage in Socratic debate.

Which should help remind us that all of these easy explanations cheapen us all, and I’m going to go back to wishing the world had something better to talk about (like poverty, aids, hunger, global warming, etc). The way the religious keep hijacking the agenda of human betterment seems to me the best advertisement for agnostic secularism, which is why I’m rather happy to live in a Canada, where that’s pretty much the way it is, although we end watching the world’s news for entertainment rather than dealing with our own social agenda. A week ago I wanted to send out the link to the Colbert Report video below, under the headline, ‘why I’m glad I’m not American’ but truth be told, inasmuch as it critiques the American economy, it’s true here as well. This type of thing warrants a lot more discussion than drawings, or ‘turncoat politicians’. - Timothy

Thursday 13 February 1986

Made decision for Valentine’s party. We were going to have a movie, The Never Ending Story.¹

1. This was a class descison, regarding a school Valentine’s day party

Wednesday 12 February 1986

Went to R’s on bus. Sliding again. Triple fun. L¹ was there. You know something, she is real dumb, dumb, dumb.

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1.L was a girl in my sister’s class who lived near the hill that we were sledding on. The ‘dumb dumb dumb’ comment referred to her statement about a plane - one was flying overhead and we could hear it, and I looked for it, and she said, ‘it’s in the sky!’ I was too young to know the expression, ‘no shit…’ and so was amazed by her general thick headedness. I look back now and think I was probably being unfair and too mean.

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