tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34133081989749324702024-03-05T02:58:32.477-05:00idleprimateidleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.comBlogger69125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-60641178627541676202015-10-16T07:10:00.001-04:002015-10-16T07:10:31.639-04:00Why I need a Female Mummy (and no, this has nothing to do with soothers or diapers or rule 43)There has been a lot of geeky rage on the internet lately at an incursion of female characters into our beloved fantasy land of cinema. Whether it was all the pissing and moaning about the upcoming Ghostbusters, or the utterly fantastic Furiosa, and now, with the rumour that there may be a remake of the Mummy where we imagine the Mummy as a female monster(heavens to Betsy), the evolution of stories moving to include women really unsettles people. this is my response to a comment I received in a thread on a movie site, after i had already said that if for no other reason, I want my daughter to have heroes in the magic shadows. Writing it, I kind of hoped that it might soothe tha anger and actually be hearable by the person who was reacting to my earlier comments. I hoped it might make sense to anyone else that read it. And as a man who often finds himself angry about issues of gender, I really wanted it to resonate within me and remind me that a lot of things that seem at odds don't have to be. <br />
<br />
It is easy to dismiss the movies as not a big important thing, compared to other issues, but they are. We spend a lot of time watching them and absorbing their metaphors and analogues of our lives. The ideas and feelings we are presented with reverberate within us and spread to what we believe and how we live and interact. They don't just change us, they form us, they form our vision of ourselves, and they are a legacy we leave behind. (Ask Leni Riefenstahl--see we have female monsters, so surely need them in our frightful stories)<br />
<br />
This, then was my reply to some friction I received on a website at the idea of a female Mummy (I can't believe I just typed that):<br />
<br />
"No, I am a man, and a father. I don't see these things as shoehorning,
or as an attack (what is being attacked?) Should we have "equality in
the workplace and school and jobs and stuff" but with maybe the most
meaningful thing we do that makes us human--tell stories--just tell
stories about men? What will that teach my daughter? Growing up, I
could want to be the Mummy for Halloween; as an adolescent I could dream
of escape with Mad Max. Now she can too.<br /><br />Women are 53% of the
population. And they dream just like we do. They also have sucky lives
just like we do. Why shouldn't they get to go to the theatre and for a
couple of hours get to be heroes, cads, rogues, monsters and villains?<br /><br />I
am not a fan of much of the politics or media message of feminism. I'm
not. I couldn't count the number of arguments i get shut down in with
the accusation of my being misogynist, because my opinion differs from what
is commonly accepted. But this one seems like a no brainer.<br /><br />I
am a misfit geek, and I was very lonely when I was young. Hell, I am
lonely now and rely on movies as a soothing force in my life. Movies
were and still are a great balm in my life. My daughter sometimes seems the same
way. I want that when she is going to the theatre, or staying up all
night with her friends and videos, that she has her own ET, Highlander, Raiders, Escape
From NewYork, The Thing, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Goonies, The
Last Starfighter, etc. etc. But most of my so treasured youthful
cinema memories have no girls for her to root for or empathize with.
For that matter they didn't have any for me to empathize with either.<br /><br />Lots
of characters and stories become iconic or mythic, we retell them, and we
make new movies about them. It seems the most natural thing in the
world that we might retell them with women as characters. That we might include them
in our human narratives. Indeed, it sounds ridiculous to need to say it. Why wouldn't we want women heroes and
villains. As men, why wouldn't we be curious how these stories play out
from this different perspective? I don't lose Mad Max because we now
have Furiosa. My stories are richer now. I won't lose my childhood Ghostbusters because we will
soon have gang of female Ghostbusters. A lifetime of images of the Mummy, from the original Universal Studios film to Scooby-Doo, aren't harmed by
telling a story of a female mummy. To think otherwise is ridiculous,
even if one wasn't interested in engaging that story.<br /><br />What would I
be telling my daughter, or my sister or my female friends, if I said
all this rich territory of narrative is not open to them. It becomes a
heinous ugly version of Alfalfa and his no girls allowed club.<br /><br />I
like to think that outside of the media frenzy for gender wars that we
all get along and that we need and love each other. But what must my
daughter think when she is on the internet and she sees the rage caused
by simply placing women in stories, by comments like yours? I can't
even guess what she must feel like to be so reviled and feared and to
have people demanding that she not get to be in our human stories. in
our legends. in the story version of our existence.<br /><br />We tell new
stories, we tell stories that resemble old stories, and just like with
mythology, we retell our favorite stories with new angles. One of those
angles is creating female heroes and villains and monsters. It is very
difficult to see a reason why that isn't a wondrous thing.<br /><br />I'm
not saying you don't have things to be angry about. I have things i am
angry about too. This isn't one of them. This is an opportunity. This is
growth. This is evolution happening. This is exciting. This is embracing. This is one of the
places where we get to put down any gender war we feel we are in and
revel together in the magic we all feel about the movies."idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-29964100497949581912013-10-20T10:45:00.003-04:002013-10-20T15:51:40.820-04:00Eulogy for a Space Alien.My mother died last week. I attended a service for her. Wonderfully, her daughters spoke for her and they spoke well. I couldn’t bring myself to step up so I speak here now.<br />
<br />
My mother was a wonderful mother to us all and we all feel lost without her. But that is not what this space is for.<br />
<br />
It is for her.<br />
<br />
My mother was more than a mother.
Gail got skipped ahead 2 grades as a child. Because that is how they rewarded children back then. It meant she had to move in a social sphere outside anything she could have coped with.
And she did.<br />
<br />
And unlike many women, she went to university. There, she wanted a drama club and there wasn’t one. So she made one. She created it out of nothing and made it happen.<br />
<br />
She wanted to mark her independence. Fiercely. So she moved to Montreal. On the map it is 2 hours but we all know it meant a foreign country. She had no fear and just went ahead. We can only thank her bravery because she met my father there. And without that we would not have happened. None of us kids would be here.<br />
<br />
Gail excelled and earned an honours degree. And then she got pregnant. Some women back then would have been content and become a housewife.
Not our Gail. She had dreams. To do things. Back then, a woman still just settled down. Not Gail.
My mother had a productive career after that with Canadian Marconi and then with Bell Northern Research. If those names sound familiar it is because they are. They were and are the biggest companies we have. For the youngsters, think Blackberry, but before we had computers.<br />
<br />
She was a technical writer for them, translating what the engineers said to the money men. She was crucial. The whole company could not have run except for her work. I need to remember that.<br />
<br />
My mother was a huge fan of science fiction. 30 years before the internet made it easy to be a lazy nerd my mother wanted a convention in Ottawa. So she joined the people who also wanted that and she made it happen. Just like her drama club except far bigger.<br />
<br />
She helped make it happen and I had the privilege to grow up with a Gestetner cranking in the back ground because she kept the newsletter going and then built the book that you got if you came to Maplecon in the seventies. if you were there, and you got a book, you have to thank her.<br />
<br />
My formative experiences include that which no one else could have given. I was a Con boy. My mother made it happen not because she was a mom, but because she was Gail and loved sharing ideas.<br />
<br />
My mother chose, and i say chose, she did not have to, to look after my father in his illness for 25 years. One quarter of a century for us young people to think about. More than a generation.<br />
<br />
That only slowed my mother down. Not stopped her.
Moving to the country she had land for a garden. A real garden. Gail grew food. Not satisfied she grew organic food. not satisfied she studied everything there was to make organic food. Some people would have stopped there. Not Gail. It wasn’t enough to just go out at 4am and pick off the grubs and potato bugs, not Gail.
If she took something up, it was for the whole hog.<br />
<br />
She studied and amassed a whole library of organic farming. But that wasn’t enough if our world wanted to encroach on her little acre of happiness. So that little woman fought. In her fifties, she took another degree in Environment and geography to arm herself with the facts. It wasn’t enough to pick grubs like nobody’s business.<br />
<br />
My mother did everything for keeps.<br />
<br />
She cried--one of the only times i saw her cry--and felt sad that for the next twenty years of her never ceasing search, no one would hire her to save our planet--or for anything because who needs older women?-- even with all her knowledge. But she kept hoping she could share her knowledge and never gave up, ever.<br />
<br />
We know the world, and it has no place for older women on a paycheck. We told her to settle down and accept that she wouldn’t have another job coming.
My mother just kept being enthusiastic. She wanted a place in the world but if it wasn’t coming, she would do the same thing she had been doing since she was a girl—push.<br />
<br />
My mother then pushed with craft. She supported my father in his woodworking efforts and surpassed him once she was in--and he himself was a master. One of the chairs she designed is in our House of Commons right now.<br />
<br />
Then she went back to her first love, and wrote stories. She wrote mysteries and supported all the other writers even though she was loathe to make friends outside of work.<br />
<br />
She studied making animation, and then stop motion film because she loved movies and thought maybe she could join in.<br />
<br />
Right up until illness slowed her, my mother had endless enthusiasm for not just anything, but everything that caught her attention.
And nothing could slow it down.<br />
<br />
I tried. I was the cynical arguing bad guy to her good guy arguments for 25 years and she never ever lost any optimism or enthusiasm.
Nothing could slow Gail down. Not even a sour son.<br />
<br />
I remember this now after I was cranky about how slow her body got. How pissy I would get about her being forgetful or losing her way.<br />
<br />
Everyone declines, but some people are still formidable.<br />
<br />
My mother, so private, so timid, got on a plane and crossed an ocean to save her son when he was in trouble and never asked for thanks, not even once.<br />
<br />
She just revelled in being Little Old Lady And Cat but she could still cleave the world in two if it meant saving her children.<br />
<br />
Gail was so much more than a mother and all the amazing things she did will never be written down in history. Instead people will remember her only as making a family.<br />
<br />
But even if we forget all the amazing things she did, we cant forget that she always had energy left over for her constantly troubled children. She saved Lynda and Robert and Anne over and over again and never once judged us.<br />
<br />
Gail Marianne MacDonald, nee Walsh was a titan. Not just a mom, not just a great mom, but a titan.
idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-32998645051034674402011-11-28T18:35:00.000-05:002011-11-28T18:35:02.529-05:00Urban LifeWhen i was a young man, just into my twenties, I was graced with the opportunity to spend a fall, winter and spring living away from the noise, filth and insanity of the city. For a time, I whiled my way in a little house on a half acre just outside a village on the edge of nowhere. <br />
<br />
I lived on the Kings Highway, a small snakey road that traverses our entire vast country without ever passing through anywhere that anyone cares about anymore, so it is dotted with tiny villages that are crumbling as the children scamper off to the big city. So, I was allowed the experience of being an inconsequential fly orbiting the quaintest of dying life forms.<br />
<br />
It was a rejuvenating bucolic time for me, spent reading Tolstoy and Thoreau in between bouts of chopping winter wood and clawing back the wild from overrunning my utopic idyll. OK, it may not have been that idyllic. I was working in a cardboard factory in the nearby village and twenty years later, my lungs are still paying for it—seriously, it was the most depressing place in the world and the employees made book on who and when each would drop dead. That isn’t a joke or hyperbole. While i worked there, a man came up on retirement and instead of much wistful conversation on what one might do with retirement, he was sunken and silent, and the rest joked about how long he would last. He died before his pension was processed. Money changed hands. It was that sort of place.<br />
<br />
But still, it was one of my few experiences in life that didn’t take place deep in a large metropolis. I treasure it to this day. The odd thing is that other than the time I was in a vehicle than slammed into a deer head on (a great story unto itself), I don’t really recall any of the wild life that one might normally think to be abundant in the country. I remember the marina, the back trails, the woods, and grapevine wrath, but not regular ambulatory life forms.<br />
<br />
Contrasting this, I have always found the concrete jungle to be teeming with life. Really. A ridiculous amount of life that very nearly gives us the finger for how much it cares what we do. My experience of the wild is inextricable from my experience of the city.<br />
<br />
I used to live in a claustrophobic apartment complex that bordered on an embassy. I don’t remember which embassy, except it was the sort that always had an RCMP vehicle keeping it under surveillance (don’t we all miss the innocence of the cold war, considering how bloody the world is now). They had a tall fence around their complex, but at one end, on their side, was a hill leading right up the fence, and on our side a dumpster. I awoke one morning to loud chittering and found an entire family of raccoons had sauntered up to what they thought was a gorge-atopia and having plummeted in, couldn’t get back out. The large male hissed and bared its teeth at me when I peeked in. I found a long thick branch, fallen from a nearby tree and put one end in, forming a ramp up and out of the cornucopic trap. No dummies, the raccoon family immediately formed rank and climbed up and out and waddled off single file and never looked back at me.<br />
<br />
Just last year, i found another family of raccoons living in a small tree in my yard. Up until then, I had never given thought to what animals do when they aren’t foraging. But for most of that summer, late at night, this family hiked up into the branches to sleep. I would never have known, but when I went outside to smoke at night they would startle awake and clamber off the tree, trundling sleepily down the length of a fence next to it. It was never a fearful run, more an irritated grumpy stumble, much the same as humans look when a fire alarm empties an apartment building. They’d go about 100 feet, dad would rear up and look back. I could see the moon reflected in his eyes, and then while I still smoked, they would start back and hoist their chubby bodies back into the branches. From evacuation to being all tucked in again took less time than my cigarette. Even if I fretted about my cats some, I enjoyed these barbapappa-like raccoons.<br />
<br />
For a while I lived in Vancouver and lacking gainful employment often found myself rambling around Stanley Park. Raccoons were well known there, only they were much larger than those I knew in the east. They would stand on their hind legs, doing their best imitation of cute to get people to feed them. They resembled nothing less than small bears with masks. Fences had been put up, adorned with warnings not to feed them as they were known to attack small children, evidently not being choosy between peanuts and babies.<br />
<br />
Out West, everything seemed bigger. And more prone to eating you. While living in Victoria, on the island I found myself sitting on the roof promenade of a mall eating a take-out, when some sea gulls came to investigate. I saw signs in bold red, warning not to feed the gulls. They were the same sort of signs that you would see at a power station warning you not to electrocute yourself by playing in the wires. Alas, I was the very snotty age of 21 and always on the lookout for a way to stick it to the man. <br />
<br />
I tore off strips of my hamburger bun and began tossing. Soon, where there were three gulls, and then there were a hundred, then two hundred. These gulls, like everything out west were much larger than I was used to. They didn’t settle for squawking but began attacking. Like the raccoons, these gulls saw no point in discriminating between a hamburger bun and my flesh. I fled for the safety of the building and they flung themselves on the, apparently bullet proof glass. There was a lesson there about not fooling about with pompous ideas of us ruling nature.<br />
<br />
I try not to forget it. I try, but forget anyway. I have had similar experiences since then, with squirrels on Mont Royal in the wet days of late March.<br />
<br />
While i was in Victoria I also got to see a pelican. Up until then, my minds image of a pelican came mostly from Walter Lantz and I expected to see the enormous pouch hanging from a dopey bird. Unlike everything else, they were smaller than expected and when they haven’t swooped up a load of fish and water that pouch is barely a waddle. Aside from a long beak, they looked nothing like what I imagined. And they looked quite regal, not like the drunken sailor cartoons made of them.<br />
<br />
While on the topic of Walter Lantz, I never saw or heard a woodpecker until this summer. Sitting on a porch in Minnesota, again smoking (i think if it were not for my filthy habit, I would never see any of the world), I first heard and then witnessed the famous bird. They are indeed handsome and bright. More than that, they are loud. Really loud. You think sawing a tree is loud? Try head butting one. That yard in Minneapolis was always chock full of colourful birds I could not name. I felt so jealous. Back home, most of the small birds were a dingy brownish grey. It was a big event to see a jay or a cardinal. In Minnesota, everyday was Tales Of The Green Forest come to life.<br />
<br />
Back in the ol’ hometown, one of the more common animals I see is the skunk. They are so common that I think they get a bad rep for spraying. It is obvious that they only spray under dire circumstances, like being run over. If it were otherwise, the entire city would stink of skunk instead of car exhaust. While working night security for an elderly home, I used to routinely come across what I assume was the same skunk, while making my perimeter rounds(this was more for bringing back naked senile escapees than keeping predators out). I learned that skunks can make an impressively aggressive chittering noise to ward you off. They really do hold that spray back for emergencies. I’m glad, because, puppies aside, there is nothing more adorable looking than a skunk. That skunk flipping the bird at me each night was the highlight of that job.<br />
<br />
Speaking of, where I live now, one night I was out back(you guessed it, smoking), when I nearly peed myself because a chuthulian nightmare came undulating across the yard straight at me. My paranoia was not delirium tremens; the thing coming at me was real and resembled some kind of manta ray. While I was making out my last will in my head and browning my shorts, it pivoted and writhed up to the front of the yard then slithered under the fence. I dashed after it in some madness, opened wide the gate and watched it ripple across my street. <br />
<br />
Under the street lamps, I could see it was a family-or tribe--of skunks(really, what do we know about them?) traveling in a close knit phalanx. The characteristic waddle ripple of a skunk is amusing when it is one. Eight of them all voltron’d up into one being looks distinctly otherworldly. The land manta gang of skunks silently disappeared into another yard and I have never again seen anything like it.<br />
<br />
At home, mostly what I like to watch are the crows. They are everywhere, ubiquitous. They do not become invisible to me though, I always think of them as knowledgeable demigods watching. And they do seem to keep tabs on us. Luckily they seem non-participatory. Science has demonstrated that they remember everything they see and do and that they transmit this information between themselves, so from what i can see, they are like a CIA who can fly. I live not that far from a house where legend has it a schizophrenic man lives, who buys enormous quantities of meat which he tosses up onto his roof to feed them(appeasement?). <br />
<br />
I do not know if this is true, but, where I live, the word ‘murder’ to depict a flock of crows is insufficient. They darken the skies in the tens of thousands. I see hundred year old trees bend under their weight. If they do signal mystical portent, then I am at ground zero for when the hobbits surface. Or the apocalypse arrives.<br />
<br />
The other bird that people nearly forget, because it is everywhere, is the pigeon. It is more common in the central city than the suburbs, but where they live, there are millions of them. I used to adore pigeons as much as I do skunks. They warble in a way that is so appealing, they sheen a great green and blue around their necks, and pivot their heads as though everything we say is daft. What’s not to like?<br />
<br />
When I lived in Montreal I used to love how many tiny plazas they had, dubbed “parks”. Usually it was a corner with prettier concrete stones, some benches and a circular fenced enclosure of bushes and a tree. These places tended to have only a few denizens other than the pigeons. There were the elderly, the unemployed and the narcotic addicted. (I will leave off mention which category I fell into). All of them, without ever conferring seemed to agree on feeding the pigeons. These parks are about as serene a place as you can find in the inner city.<br />
<br />
But that all changed while I lived in a groovy apartment in Little Italy, Ottawa, with a nice old dilapidated wooden balcony. During the winter, when we weren’t using it, it became over run as a roost for pigeons. I probably could have lived with that except that was the winter my girlfriend got pregnant. If you haven’t had children, this is the moment in life that transforms you from seeing the world as a playground to cavort in to seeing the world as a mortal threat to the well-being of your child. Overnight you become a hyper-vigilant pre-emptive strike kind of person.<br />
<br />
Before my daughter was born we began planning on an off-site location to lock up the cleaning supplies and whether we could live without electrical outlets. The pigeons were a major assault on our fortress of fertility. Pigeon guano is quite poisonous, and once dry is easily dusted up into the air. Since my girl had been tasked with the whole gestating thing, dealing with the pigeons fell on me.<br />
<br />
Despite a childhood spent revelling in the god-like power of torturing bugs, I grew up, not into a serial killer, but a gentle soul. I didn’t really want to evict these families who must care about their own children as much as we did for our unborn. But, I did feel it was a us-or-them kind of thing. And when I thought of my little baby breathing in pigeon bio-weaponry, my jaw set.<br />
<br />
Now, I know from humane traps. At a restaurant I used to work at, we used to lay out the humane traps. They consisted of shallow trays of a gluey substance. The idea was the little mouse feet would get caught in the molasses and then you would pull them free and deposit them in some more appropriate, nurturing environment, like the woods (wherever that is if you work downtown). <br />
<br />
In reality, the glue was supernaturally strong, and the caught mice, terrified would rail against it, only to trip and get their bodies caught up in it. Even more frightened, they would pull harder, slowly ripping out of their skins. I would find mice squealing in agony and if I tried to peel them off, all I achieved would be pulling them right out of their skins altogether. Very humane. I took to putting the trapped mice, trap and all, in a bag, bringing them out back and stomping on them before sending them on their farewell voyage to the dumpster.<br />
<br />
I took this painful lesson to heart when dealing with the pigeons. I went out onto that balcony, wearing my air filter, kicking up guano dust everywhere and stomped on the cheeping babies in those nests. Then I shovelled everything into garbage bags before scrubbing everything in detergent. Urban life--for them and for me. I never told the mother of my child what had been necessary. She had, generally, more sympathy for animals than people and probably would not have understood. I thought to myself, maybe it is some primal evolutionary part of fatherhood that one lives with killing the babies of the competition.<br />
<br />
That is my penultimate anecdote of urban life. Perhaps a poor one to devote so much time to, given the genial nature of this piece. It is just to say that the urban jungle is like any other jungle—vicious and decisive.<br />
<br />
I’ve left out a lot of urban life with which I am familiar. Countless rabbits and gophers could also have provided stories. Then there was two summers ago when Ottawa was inexplicably infested with wild turkeys—it became a local internet meme to post photos of a spotting. I never knew there was such a thing as a wild turkey until then. I also have loving tales of snakes and frogs in the city, but ran out of space. I will leave off on one final anecdote of life in the city.<br />
<br />
For a time, I lived in the old country, not my old country; I’m Scotch-Irish, but the old country just the same. While I hung my hat in Berlin, I cycled one day to visit the historic site where Hitler signed his little document deciding the world would be a great place with all the world’s religions minus one. Winded from a long ride I walked my bike under the shade of a wooded area and came across a boar.<br />
<br />
For fellow North American Urbanites, a boar is neither a cute little pygmy pig, nor a vacuous aimless farm pig. A boar is a large dangerous beast that can take out a human easily. Without arms, you cannot fight one and you cannot outrun one either. I looked at it. It looked at me. It measured me as no threat, snorted derisively and wandered away. In that moment I first understood what wildness was. I first connected with the idea of mankind as a naked frightened animal in the wilderness. I understood our fires and guns and mistrustfulness. I understood the uneasiness that, even in our concrete world, we still cannot shake off. I understood another living thing as something other than food or an irritant to be erased. I understood the possibility of being knocked off by something else's primal nature.<br />
<br />
I was quite shaken and cycled off. At my destination I had no stomach to visit the famous building and sat smoking in the garden. While I smoked, two young foxes leapt out of the woods, cavorting and playing without a care in the world. They never noticed me, but just jumped and rolled and yipped. Eventually an adult fox emerged from the trees, looked balefully at me, and barked. Tails down, the two young foxes skulked away and disappeared into the woods. Just another family coping with urban life.idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-36015206045039947612011-11-20T17:04:00.000-05:002011-11-20T17:04:17.988-05:00Do You Have Socialism Lurking In The Dank Corners Of Your Home?Socialism is a scarlet letter. We all know it; we fear being branded with it. All your do-gooder efforts can be quashed in an instant once you have been labeled socialist. It’s a disgusting word, like commie and pinko(and we know what happened to them—and they were so social, not fascist and crony capitalist). No effort has been spared by the enemies of community to make sure you revile socialism because socialism is the dire nemesis of inequality and the hater of wealth concentration.<br />
<br />
I am constantly impressed, no, amazed, at how completely the very wealthy people who own the newspapers, magazines, and tv have convinced the great sprawling masses that said masses deserve squalor, that they should never join together and that they should fight and sacrifice to preserve the power and wealth that is concentrated in the hands of so few. It’s brilliant. More than that, there is a side-splitting irony to it all. It works so well that it is enough to make you hate your fellow man. Except, the elite disdain for the working class—that too is an effective measure in dividing people, disempowering people and smothering socialism.<br />
<br />
Socialism is a charged term with disputed definitions. Some of the common notions or tenets associated with this vilified term are “social organization”, “collective decisions”, “allocation of economic inputs to satisfy economic demands and human needs”, “cooperative”. Doesn't sound so bad. Yet this socialism is the villain in our collective story right now, and is a vile boogey-man to be feared and hopefully dashed. According to the narrative.<br />
<br />
Really? I can see being the bad guy and disguising vinegar as kool-aid. It’s a goal effective tactic. But just handing out vinegar and expecting it to be swallowed, well, that should fail, shouldn’t it? I’m being facetious. Obviously, the blanket message received by most people is that higher ups are struggling to look after us and that socialism is a menace that would destroy us. But, man, they don’t even try hard to con us. It’s like we were begging to be demolished.<br />
<br />
There is no way I can put a dent in the effective, intelligent, far-reaching propaganda machine that wealthy neo-conservatives employ, but I can try. (and I am not being cad when I call it intelligent and effective. The proof is all around us).<br />
<br />
When you help your buddy move, even when he couldn’t foot the bill for pizza and beer--that is socialism.<br />
<br />
When you drop money in the plate at church, or in the Sally Ann pot next to the bell ringing Santa--that is socialism.<br />
<br />
When expanding on the positive reinforcement you have received from networking and sharing with family, friends and friends of friends, you feel everyone should be safe and fed--that is socialism.<br />
<br />
Devoting a bit of everyone’s income to building roads so we can get all the stuff where it needs to go, allocating it because no canny capitalist would be daft to do anything so unprofitable--that is socialism.<br />
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Devising a welfare system, either because starving homeless people make you feel icky, or you are afraid they will kill you for your home and food--that is socialism.<br />
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Building a healthcare system for the whole community, not just because it’s sad when sick children die, but also because it is unproductive and costly to let illness spread unchecked--that is socialism.<br />
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Understanding that the world is really big and complex, and wanting your community to be able to compete, and so subsidizing necessary education—all the way up, not just primary—that is socialism.<br />
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Wanting proportionate representation, and ensuring that every voter has access to valid information--that is socialism.<br />
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Creating institutions that examine and evaluate industry (say, pharmaceutical, energy, waste removal and construction, or anyone else who might affect all of society in good and bad ways) and giving their employees a living wage so they don’t have to take bribes--that is socialism.<br />
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Fighting tying up knowledge in copyrights that suck all the affluence out of a community or not--that is socialism.<br />
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Fighting the patenting of food so giant corporations cannot hold the entire hungry planet hostage--that is socialism.<br />
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Questioning labyrinthine Gordian financial tools that decree all profit to the few and all costs and failure to the community--that is socialism.<br />
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Demanding that the richest not be allowed to hide behind unaccountable corporate documents when they steal or fail--that is socialism.<br />
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Getting really angry when the richest nations on the planet feature mass amounts of hard working people losing their homes and jobs, and angrily demanding some kind of reasonable answer and response from the government that everyone pays so much for, votes for and counts on--that is socialism.<br />
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Envisioning a world where some people are rewarded more than others depending on the amount of school, work or necessity of their tasks, but not supporting a few people to make thousands of times more than most, and not relegating most tasks to a wage that is below cost of living--that is socialism.<br />
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Wishing for a world where the average person wasn’t seeking two or three jobs to get by, where that person did not live in anxiety and had time to see their kids--that is socialism.<br />
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Demanding accountability from our elected representatives, since we elected them based on what they said they were about--that is socialism.<br />
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Not treating the planet like it, and we are transient, not behaving as though we are sociopaths, alone, on our own little islands, not looking at others like they are logs for the fire--that is socialism.<br />
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If you should happen to be some well off person who despises socialism, and believes there is some meritocracy that gave you--by your bootstraps alone--all you possess, MAKE NO MISTAKE: when socialism fails, I will sit in your sparkling kitchen eating a sandwich over your bleeding out body that I stabbed, before I loot your home. Do you know why? It will be me only because I was first in a very very long line. And I will laugh while your life ebbs.idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-15187590775591650952011-05-27T21:36:00.000-04:002011-05-27T21:36:05.476-04:00CBR III #5: Blake Bell's Fire & Water: Bill Everett, the Sub-mariner, & the Birth of Marvel ComicsPart of me wants to adopt the voice of Stan Lee: Because you demanded it, the bio; Excelsior. But that’s just not true. In Bill Everett’s twilight years of creating comics and superheroes for generations, Stan Lee came to power and created what we now know as comics. Stan Lee is a household name. Bill Everett is not. Yet Bill Everett had laid down all the right notes before Stan was even a gofer.<br />
<br />
Bill Everett was an alcoholic who struggled with the bottle as much as his chosen profession. He constantly missed deadlines and let people down. But such was his personality and his work that someone would always keep hum employed. <br />
<br />
He created the Sub-Mariner. He created the Human Torch. He introduced a bold muscular violence to comics that never existed before him. Today, we thrive on action and heroics in the movies. Bill Everett made that happen. He died of a broken liver with little fame. And he bequeathed soaring action to the comics.<br />
<br />
This book is not a biography, isn’t painstakingly researched, and doesn’t profess to be so. It’s a big coffee table art book filled with anecdotes, and legend and endless pages of really good art. It is exactly what it purports to be.<br />
<br />
I am myself not an expert in the history of comics, and I sometimes do not see what is described in the book. There was much better draftsmanship to come. Better stories. Better ideas. But when people first started to think about stapling together comic drawings and selling them, Bill Everett was THE maverick.<br />
<br />
I don’t even like his drawing style. But I did see his motion and narrative and learned a lot about the art form. That is why you want this book.<br />
<br />
Yes, the stories of comics in the forties are memorable and nostalgic. But that isn’t the focus here. It’s a big book. It is filled with his art. You get your money’s worth just for that. The text is secondary.<br />
<br />
What it does do is give a portrait of a just born art, and the way one man shaped graphic narrative for decades to come. I will never love his drawings; they really do seem cheap and empty to me. I have not eyes to see that part of history. What I did learn, though, was the birth of motion through panels, of suspense, of trepidation. The kinds of layouts that Bill Everett produced from his imagination allowed all future generations of comics to be. He had no history to draw upon. And no one paid him enough to care. He, in fact, professed not to care. And yet here we are, basking in the wealth that he helped form.<br />
<br />
If you ever loved comics, this book is for you. If you want a critical biography, keep on truckin’, but you won’t find a better one of Bill Everett. The book tells three stories: The birth of comics, the growth of an artist, and an artist’s downfall. It does so with love and reverence, between the mighty pages of art. What else can I say?<br />
<br />
If he had come on the scene 20 years later, someone might have said excelsior. He might command better respect and be better known. But that didn’t happen. At least we have this book today. Thank god for that.idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-681523235933601742011-05-13T19:00:00.000-04:002011-05-13T19:00:40.911-04:00CBR III #4: Michael Chabon’s the Yiddish Policeman’s Union<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal">Reading Michael Chabon inevitably leaves me with my skin tingling, my senses rapacious and my soul restless with a passionate and earnest urgency to be awake in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t underscore the vibrant hot-bloodedness of his work enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haul the most tawdry hyperbole out of the cellar that I can find, and it is lacking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My shriveled black heart blooms and mutates in his work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have trouble looking people in the eye afterward because I am vulnerable and teary, a naked and painful love-creature bounding, swollen with both jubilation and melancholy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t normally try and articulate the wonder of his work; I just give people his books, like a dime store apostle.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">People familiar with Chabon will know that he is a shameless lover of genre fiction and has an alchemist’s skill for twisting and blending supposed low-brow conventions into penetrating art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternate history that speculates on an outcome of WWII and an Israeli war that results in a 60 year interim Jewish state in Alaska.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story takes place in the waning days of the Sitka Jewish state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>2 million citizens are paralyzed with anxiety over what is to become of them and it is a credit to Chabon’s story-telling that it takes over a hundred pages of embedding the reader into this world to truly reveal the fear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this world, the Jews are not welcome anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mirroring actual histories, they are being evicted, without any options for where to go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The theme of being forced into action, but with no good choices to make is reflected in layer after layer of the actual story, a motif that frames the story in the chess conundrum of zugzwang .</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In this fully realized world, Chabon delivers a hardboiled noir of a mystery that comfortably stands shoulder to shoulder with Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Jim Thompson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In true Chabon fashion, the mystery is a love letter to the genre and Chabon uses it to explore the rich themes that always flow through his work:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>love, family, father son relationships, identity, loss, grief, endurance, guilt, redemption.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We meet Meyer Landsman, a depressed, drunk, down-at-the-heel police detective who wants nothing more than to disappear into a black hole after his marriage implodes over a pre-natal tragedy (another zugzwang in the story).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, a junky is murdered down the hall from him and the hollow empty death takes hold of Landsman and won’t let go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon it becomes apparent that the murder is a single loose end in something far larger, as the case is buried and closed, from the highest orders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Marlowe, or the Continental Op, this sets Landsman on an obsessed course to find the truth no matter what is uncovered and no matter the lumps he takes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a pitch perfect story in this regard:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the seemingly isolated crime, the hints of wealth and power being tied to the crime, the exhausting labyrinth that becomes more dangerous and more futile at every turn, the improbably large conspiracy revealed by the dogged obsession of the detective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chabon braids politics, organized crime and Jewish mythology into an audacious almost hammy story that successfully juxtaposes pathos with almost keystone kop silliness.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Like any good potboiler, the story, despite being vast, is actually a claustrophobic embroilment of several interwoven families and their secret violent histories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The protagonist and the murder are catalyst for everything to unravel.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If it was only a noir, it would be a great noir.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it was only a literary journey through the painful hearts of marriages, families and communities it would be a great literary journey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it was only a subtle and nuanced exploration of a speculative alternate history providing insight into the real world and its history, it would excel on that front too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Chabon sets the bar high, and goes for the trifecta and achieves it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The other thing that needs mentioning (unless you’ve read anything by Chabon) is his virtuoso opera of language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chabon’s gift of language requires lusty, athletic, blood streaked metaphors to describe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s punk, not chamber music; it’s a cage match not fencing, it’s needy primal fucking, not lovemaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In any lesser hand, Chabon’s brand of extravagant verbosity and punch drunk metaphors would be shameless purple prose, but he has an inner wizardry that transcends the rules and even the most jaded reader can’t help but become ecstatic.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Stop reading this review, go read the book!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-53970680733971998432011-05-10T18:33:00.000-04:002011-05-10T18:33:54.828-04:00The Pleasures of Aging<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The other day, my doctor said to me, “you aren’t twenty anymore, what do you expect?”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t know if she was insinuating something about my soaring blood pressure, my sagging pectorals or my stagnating dreams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then it dawned on me, if I can begin an anecdote with ‘the other day my doctor said to me’, I have become another statistic in the plague that goes by the lurid name, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aging</i>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">She told me I needed to reduce my fat and salt intake, lose half my body weight, cut out alcohol and caffeine altogether, and eat green vegetables.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“Green vegetables”, I said, “I am way too old to form new habits now”!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Not understanding that a rich sense of humour is the only effectively proven method of attaining immortality, she scowled and said, “If you don’t do these things, you will never see your hundredth birthday”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My face went ashen: my one true fear is going blind.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Using what I clearly recognized as the patented Bruce Lee Two Fingers of Death, she jabbed me in the side and asked if it hurt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She just got angrier with me when I whimpered and asked if it was a trick question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aging, I am quickly learning, is a condition of fear and vulnerability where people are always angry at you and may abuse you out of some twisted transference of mortality dread.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I tried to placate her with good intentions, but by this time she was hell-bent on my getting comeuppance, and so, ordered a battery of tests.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I found myself with a requisition for an ultrasound, something that up until now I thought was simply part of midwifery witcheries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel pretty certain it was to confirm that I have in fact been the victim of organ theft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During my half day layover in the waiting room of the clinic, I pictured the jelly lube, the little rubber gadget, and a cute technician and had just about consoled myself that it was going to be pretty much like sexytimes when my number came up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was made to put on a paper dress that was obviously stolen from a fashion blind pygmy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On me, it shredded instantly, and if it weren’t for my nervous sweat gluing the bits on, I would have been the next Chippendale patient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dignity, it seems, is just another sacrifice on the altar of aging.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Alas, sexy times were not to manifest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The technician, whose forearms I envied, employed all the enthusiasm and fervor of a dog digging for a bone and set to work attempting to reach my spine through my abdominal wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a clever technique really: by systematically tenderizing my organs one by one, she verified their continued presence.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">At the x-ray clinic, again denuded and crepe papered, I was ridiculed over my nipple ring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was fuming with the injustice that Keith Richards can do what he does, but suddenly I am relegated to the high riding plaid pants section of the store. No urban primitive jewelry for old people! Actually I think she wanted to make sure I didn’t have a tumour shaped like a mystical symbol, fearing that if I had some proven sign of being the antichrist I might wind up a rich tv evangelist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am learning that the medical community is a caring community.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The testing gauntlet, worse than those humiliating Canada Fitness Tests they used to break the spirits of children from the seventies, accomplished it’s morbid task:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am now acutely aware that I am becoming an old fart.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It’s like a wall of denial crumbled and now I notice ringing in my ears, flattened arches, and the end of a pee is becoming an increasingly vague and variable period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the ongoing bickering between my bed and my back, I realize it is me, not my bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My vision is going, my teeth are hanging on by a thread, and today I used the word ‘piles’ in its euphemistic sense.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Part of the onslaught is I am losing my powers of language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More and more, in a state of confusion, I find myself consulting my dictionary and thesaurus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While I find the activity soothing and always have, I feel paranoid that simply owning a dictionary and thesaurus is a sign of aging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From there, I start to question if being paranoid is a sign of aging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s like going down the rabbit hole.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The language thing is real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t spell anymore, I forget words and names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stumble and stutter and lose my train of thought mid sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found it really embarrassing until I employed the brilliant strategy of heavy drinking as a scapegoat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pounding the potables, or dedicated dipsomania, as the thesaurus might put it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It’s sad too, the things you lose as you age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I used to enjoy interjecting ‘get off my lawn’ and ‘when I was your age we had to walk through 3 miles of broken glass and lava to get to school’ as playful ironic banter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, all that playful irony is gone, and people nod and smile while ignoring me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I used to get angry that I should be expected to give up my seat on the bus just because someone was ninety, even though I actually paid more for my fare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aging has robbed me of my righteous anger as now people offer me up their seats.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It’s not all bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s like the motto for that thing I can’t remember: Membership Has Its Rewards.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When I was young and would flirt with girls, I was laughed at because they all wanted someone more mature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I aged, the reaction turned to scorn and occasionally being maced because I was perceived as a skeevy pervert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, I am on the cusp of my golden years, where if I flirt, girls think it’s just adorable.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Aging also brings you to the laurel time, you gain respect and your achievements are acknowledged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I was younger, I enjoyed the obsessive vice of cross country running.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That pleasure I was soon denied as I was told I had the knees of an 80 year old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I laughed—not only is the notion of an 80 year old running pretty unbelievable, but I had my doubts that some skulking octogenarian could pull a switcheroo with me without my even noticing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, I was pretty bummed for the next 25 years until I realized it wasn’t a literal statement, but a reference to a bizarre genetic aging anomaly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After some quick back of the envelope calculations, my pride was rejuvenated—by my estimation, my knees are now 227 years old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most people’s knees are one with the cosmos at that age, while mine continue to demand glucosamine and tremble when my blood sugar is low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely someone could get a grant to study my achievement?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m still waiting to hear back from Ripley’s.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Aging is a great equalizer too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I may have been ugly when I was young, but we all look like dilapidated potatoes as the years go by.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while I never excelled at sport and suffered the stigma that accompanies, there comes a day when simply maintaining continence puts you ahead of the curve.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So, it’s not all bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I find myself at a Starbucks, ordering my decaf, and on a whim complement my barrista and give her a wink. She beams a great smile back at me and says “you’re so adorable” and I realize I am living the dream.</span></div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-86193127579669972282011-05-04T16:51:00.000-04:002011-05-04T16:51:58.886-04:00Welcome To The New Dark Ages<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal">My problem with democracy is 50 million Elvis fans <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> be wrong. They can be wrong about all kinds of shit. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is much more than the oversimplified idea that electing leaders based on popularity, soundbites and tie choice is a dodgy way to go about things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My problem with democracy is most people are, through no fault of their own, not in a great position to make informed choice--whether they are smart or stupid, greedy or community oriented.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if inclined towards good decisions, does the average citizen have the time, energy and accurate information to become knowledgeable about economics, environment, climate, social costs and benefits?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm not saying the average voter is a simpleton (though it seems that way at times) but that s/he is very busy with mundane immediate concerns (like paying the rent or feeding the kids) and the world is a very big and very complex set of systems.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Add to the recipe a media that confuses people about important issues so intensely that people will often become hostile at even being asked to think about something. Sometimes this media is incompetent in exactly the same way as the poor voter, but often the Media, concentrated as it is in the hands of a wealthy few, has a strong agenda not at all in line with the best interests of the average voter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Now you have a voter, commuting several hours a day, working at a job that is perhaps underpaid, struggling to keep a roof over his two kid’s heads and he has at best 20 minutes a day for information gathering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This, he usually gleans from The Sun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His peers are pretty much identical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of them want to appear ignorant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of them are biologically wired, and socially conditioned to look for group identity and fear the consequences of standing out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now you have a group with very little real information, a great deal of misinformation and slant, and a strong desire to take the shortest route to a comfortable unconflicted solidarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span></span>If you think I am painting an unrealistic portrait of Joe Six-Pack, chances are you are an idealist who spends little time among the working class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not so different among the white-collared except they have a bigger mortgage and receive their propaganda dose from The Globe and Mail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then these people are expected to vote, not on an issue, but for a fairly concentrated executive group who will make decisions and laws for four years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the government screws them over, they are told tough titty, you got what you voted for. But did they understand what they were voting for?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The vast majority of people, including those with higher education—which face it, isn’t what it used to be, and at its strongest tends to be highly specialized--are not well informed about virtually any of the issues that should concern them most when it comes to civic activity, politics or voting.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The average citizen doesn't even understand that smaller government (a constant Conservative rallying cry) means less social goods and protections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They do not understand that the majority of tax money is recycled right into society via jobs, social programs, culture, healthcare, infrastructure, safety regulations, etc, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They vote for the party promising smaller government because they have been bamboozled into thinking that the government is their enemy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span></span>Ironically, by fulfilling the promise of leaner government through gutting social spending, deregulation, closing down oversight departments, cutting science spending, and fighting public unions, the resulting social problems confirm for the voter his suspicion that government is the enemy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a bonus: that same government still manages to overspend, just not in ways that benefit the people, further aggravating the voter. The sad thing is this cycle often does not translate into a shift in alliances to parties that actually would look after the voter better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Absurdly, the voter often takes out his anger on the party that would be his best ally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in a heavily mediated environment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Take for example, recent talks to privatize Canada Post.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>CP is not an essential service, but the way privatization is framed perfectly illustrates the smaller government fallacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The spin in the media is that this will create competition and efficiency and benefit you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, Canada Post is not only fiscally responsible, but generates a profit, nearly 300 million dollars annually, the article I read stated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So talks of privatization are, from the get go, about fixing things that ain’t broke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The article went on to state that 2/3 of CP’s expenses are the incomes of its 71 000 employees and that that money is costing you too much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The article warns that in coming years a stamp could rise to 61 cents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given the size of Canada, this still strikes me as a steal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">What made me angry is this angle I see all the time that you should feel vindictive because people are employed at a living wage, that wages are a frivolous unacceptable use of money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These wages, posed as a negative are wages that get spent on houses and washing machines and cars, on restaurant meals, on clothes, on charitable donations, on taxes that keep parks, sewers and roads in good shape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These wages aren’t stolen from you; they are part of the social compact of interdependence and mutual benefit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These wages contribute to a healthy economy and a functioning community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span></span>With privatization, some significant portion of those jobs disappears altogether; many become rehires at substandard wages with benefits and protections removed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The newly unemployed are added into job competition (which pushes wages down), the reduced wage employees have less money to spend in the community and contribute less tax to the government leaving it less able to provide for the community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The collective economic and political clout of the people is reduced as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lastly, the price of postage does not go down because private executives make much bigger salaries and with those fussy government regulations out the window perhaps the mail is less reliable too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">There isn’t a single good reason for an average person to want Canada Post privatized, but if all a person has to go on is the persuasive slanted media (that doesn’t feel the same strident need to portray “both sides of the story” as it does with climate change), that person will probably feel encouraged and supportive that another fat-cat public institution is getting its comeuppance.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">More and more often, it’s the same story no matter the issue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People are fooled into laws that harm them, deregulating safeguards that protect them, foisting costs into the public and profits into the private.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it really hard to see the harm in a Harper government?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Slash social spending; this grows poverty desperation, and social ills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Create an omnibus crime bill with harsher sentencing and wider swathes of criminally deemed activities which eventually soar due to the aforementioned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Build private super prisons for a slave waged “competitive” manufacturing industry for profit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is that what it has come to mean to be Canadian?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">What is the end game in destroying civil rights and their institutions—for women, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, children, psychiatric patients and what motivates someone to vote for that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s the end game in destroying environmental protection departments, closing down scientific bodies and denying the already actualizing consequences of climate change and what motivates someone to vote for that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What motivates an average citizen to vote for a constrictive police state of disempowered citizens while creating a free for all for banks and corporations?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">Why do farmers vote conservative, their worst enemy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know working poor and unemployed people who voted conservative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know rabid atheists who voted for Harper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know women who voted for Harper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You would think in a world of record oil profits even the most ignorant voter would be wary of a party that endorses fat subsidies and tax breaks for the oil industry?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I get angry at voters even though voters are so poorly situated to vote well so it’s hard to blame them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do blame our voting system and voter apathy for awarding a majority government to the party that received approval from 24% of the electorate. 60% of the electorate voted, and nearly 40% of those chose Harper.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Harper doesn't even talk a good game about "the people" or "family values" or any other traditional political veil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever he refers to Canadians, he sounds like he is speaking of foreigners who he deems barely human, an irritating obstacle that needs to be humoured at times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, I just don't understand him winning an election, except that a lot of the non-voters are people who wouldn't have voted conservative had they voted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They did not understand that refusing to vote was not a vote for none of the above, or an act of defiance, but a tacit endorsement of whoever did end up with the most votes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If every person who earns less than 25 grand a year and didn't vote had added their vote to the NDP, we'd likely have Prime Minister Layton today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>There were a lot more non-voters than Harper votes. Think about that. If every non-voter had voted rhinoceros party, they would be the government of Canada.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, discusses at length how helpful it is to conservatives to encourage the idea that "all parties are the same" and "what difference does my vote make" and "politics is all corruption and greed", because it never fools conservatives, only left leaning people and vulnerable people who feel powerless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every time a conservative rolls back the social good, it reinforces powerlessness to the vulnerable people in society and they feel further disenfranchised from the political process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a terrible ignorance fed feedback loop.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I keep hearing “the people have spoken”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I think, so what.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if it weren’t the case that a small minority has granted a great deal of power to a dangerous man, even if it was a real majority, even if it was unanimous, should I feel consoled that democracy has been served?</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-78775227117252463572011-03-24T09:33:00.002-04:002011-03-25T13:24:35.980-04:00Houdini and the Irreverence of Imagination<div class="MsoNormal">There was a period during my childhood where when my imagination was ignited by the idea of magic, I wasn’t thinking about Narnia or Middle Earth, but Harry Houdini. I don’t remember why. Stage Magic and Escape Artists were and still are largely a thing of the past (other than the rare performer who is more about Pink Floydesque light shows than human scale misdirection and contortions). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I read every biography of the man I could find at the library. And I remember I owned a weighty tome, a bible sized book, not even a kids book, on the history of stage magic. It had a bright red book jacket and the simple, monolithic and dignified title, Magic. The typography on the cover was in majestic turn of the century ornate lettering. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps it was a fascination with larger than life figures, and the enthralling mystery of the past with its rough wool coats and horse drawn carriages. That probably is it, because at the same time Houdini was enchanting me, I was fascinated with Edison, The Wizard of Menlo Park, and Alexander Graham Bell who accomplished the feat of sending his voice through a wire to be heard in the distance.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I'm reminded of all this because this morning, during an internet ramble over groggy coffee, I saw that one of the top trending topics on Twitter was Harry Houdini. Much as his name is still instantly recognizable and practically a synonym for escapology (yes, that is a word), being a Twitter meme just struck me as so randomly and absurdly improbable. Turns out, it is the crafty dodger’s birthday today. Ok, fine; but does that explain cresting a Twitter wave? Is Houdini still that deep in the contemporary public’s imagination? Is he still a cultural icon? Do little boys dress up as him for Halloween? Is there an action figure?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I put down my coffee, put on my Sherlock cap(when I was a kid, I didn’t need to rely on metaphor when I needed my Sherlock cap), and rolling up my sleeves set out to understand why, 85 years after his death, Houdini was topping the Twitter charts. I scanned some biographical material, looked up various events and retrospectives going on around the world, but nothing really explained why suddenly the cybervoid was cascading with Houdini chatter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am a lazy and easily distracted investigator, and after 10 minutes or so of furious inquiry, it struck me that a Google image search of the man was just the instant gratification my frustration required. Serendipity loves me, and I found that today, the sign hanging over the Google shop looked like this:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXntri1s3am-atZMOu_7iFbwLOONoknVhuBOZWNySLuweGLtd4e27t1a4gxYvXlPOiSryRnbMClzKxhxoRvICG2IbPhW2SmS0hhDDsAVb-e6OFi4NQwzboatjZj-1VihRtbb3FNnzYnVo/s1600/google+goudini.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXntri1s3am-atZMOu_7iFbwLOONoknVhuBOZWNySLuweGLtd4e27t1a4gxYvXlPOiSryRnbMClzKxhxoRvICG2IbPhW2SmS0hhDDsAVb-e6OFi4NQwzboatjZj-1VihRtbb3FNnzYnVo/s320/google+goudini.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Mystery solved. Sort of.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m not sure why Google, who often dresses up its logo for holidays, would actually cobble together a completely different logo for this particular historical figure. Maybe whoever owns Google was also fascinated as a child. Doesn’t really matter, I heartily approve of the colourful gesture. I approve of a nod that makes millions of people stop for a moment and imagine the past; a nod that might spark a childhood memory of bright eyed wonder; a nod that reminds us of spectacles that didn’t require 200 million dollars worth of special effects. It’s a delightful way to start the day.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I find myself, now, still casting back in memory to days of childhood enterprises when my pursuits required no order or reason. I simply raced off after my obsessive nose in any direction that took me in the moment. One week it might be steam engines, the week before that Charles M. Schulz. Always, either the library or my household bookshelves had something to feed fierce curiosity. Of course, trawling library stacks for answers was just as likely to result in abandoning a question when kismet intervened in the form of some completely unrelated book catching my eye.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It all gets me thinking about a series of articles in the British press over the last couple of days. Some Minister was rallying for a reading challenge of 50 books a year for kids. It was a goodwill publicity kind of thing, some easy sound bites— really, it’s not such a stretch to stand up and say you are generally in favor of literacy. Only there was a backlash as the British government (and everywhere really) is closing libraries, slashing school budgets and social programs and in general making it more and more difficult for children to have books. A number of prominent authors piped up to on the nature of reading, the motivations for reading. They criticized the idea of quantifying reading, of making it seem a chore, a hurdle to overcome. After all, a child who likes reading will plow through enormous numbers of books, many times the low bar 50 expectation. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There was also much discussion on what children should read. Recommendations of important novels poured in. Serious people called out for the inclusion of non-fiction. I appreciated Philip Pullman’s contribution that children need ready access to ample amounts of rubbish. It echoes sentiments Michael Chabon has so often elaborated on concerning the value of pulp novels, genre fiction and comic books. There aren’t many as literate as Chabon, so I am inclined to accept his wisdom on the matter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Really what all the factions combined are getting at is children need access to a broad variety of books. Rather than a curriculum, or seal of approval from educators, they need no one peeping over their shoulders or interrupting them as they follow their own spontaneous noses.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, children also need to see adults reading, to know that it is a normal past time. It also plants the seed to wonder what is in those books that they should so occupy the attention of adults. I was fortunate to grow up in a home where making rounds of the library and book store was as regular as many people hit up Netflix. Keep in mind, this wasn’t the parental chore of getting a kid to read. The adults were just following their own noses and I was left to my own devices. No one told me to read, or what to read. If someone had, they wouldn’t have been recommending Houdini biographies or Peanuts strips. And I probably would have resented being told what I ought to be interested in and for how long.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What does any of this have to do with Houdini’s birthday? Nothing. But it does have to do with spontaneous curiosity generated by a logo, by random objects and events in our paths that ignite something and beckon us to follow. It does have to do with the real magic books have to transport and transform, and to fill the mind while always increasing its capacity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So Happy Birthday Houdini. Thanks for all the memories. And thank you libraries for having been able to keep up with my rapacious appetite.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-3813160349780456892011-03-13T22:18:00.004-04:002011-05-04T17:21:50.573-04:00Raiders of Raiders of the Lost Ark<div class="MsoNormal">A good friend of mine cited timing as being everything. He wrote eruditely of the boomers, in context of their timing with rock and roll. I will take his lead to do the same.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While I loathe calling it so, Generation X commenced in 1964. Its imagination grew in the the 70’s and early ‘80s. It’s one of the reasons that Star Wars is such a big thing on the internet. Culture and technology interacting.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sleight of hand aside, that film is not my purpose, nor is Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was just trying to attract your attention. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That film, Raiders, was one of the first films I ventured out of my neighbourhood to see, unsupervised (so I am a full on gen x). My friends and I went into a newfangled far away thing called a Cineplex, and used our g-rated tickets to get into Raiders. We walked out afterward into the bright light in ecstasy. Nothing had ever prepared us for Raiders of the Lost Ark. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I was torn between how badly I wanted to be Dr. Jones, or have my father be Dr. Jones. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">By the time of the second film several years later, I was already lost in arson, theft and other adolescent norms in a bad neighbourhood and such is the chasm of a few years: a far cry from dreaming of adventure. I never saw the second film until much later. When I did, I was angry, it seemed cheapened. It did not remind me of that rich time of childhood when everything was possible. The first time I encountered it, I think I turned it off. It seemed to capitalize in a paltry way on the Indie magic in a way that only seems more common today. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you were young from ’75-85, you are a warm loved child of Spielberg and Lucas. Why would I have missed and then hated this film? Jaws came out in ’75; Close Encounters in ’77; Star Wars also came out in ’77, and Empire in ’81. By the time Temple Of Doom Came out, these crazy lovable films, originally dreamed up by renegades, were being made by wealthy icons beholden to industry. I missed some of these in the theatre, but basked in them under the golden glow of late night television.Then along came The Thing, and then The Terminator.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I love my youth in film. I really do. I had the best of Henson, of Lucas, of Spielberg, of Carpenter, of Cameron. Unfortunately all that gorgeous mythical beauty spawned the blockbuster. They inspired big fast films that gripped our needs. And I had great films later, but they all seemed to keep being watered down. I do not believe in a golden age. I think great films happened before my time, and continue to evolve after my time. But the blockbuster has a monetary hold that it doesn’t deserve and that shapes it into a factory product often enough. And it derives from my demographic going to the cinema.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I won’t do the math here, but you can look for yourself. The big blockbusters that spawned our current producer spending habits all made 10-25 times their budget. It’s no wonder that moguls took notice. But now, we have big stupid action pieces with no mythos, nothing memorable and they earn 1.25 times their budgets and in the big dollars, that is just barely enough. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m not a curmudgeon. Some great movies come out of this popcorn film industry. Little dramas like Monsters, and big extravaganzas like the way the new Batman movies have grabbed people. But the drama, and creative pictures by story tellers are vanishing. Instead, we get silly blockbusters with truly cut-out characters and they don't enchant so much, hell we hardly pay attention to them even while watching them</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">I will admit that as a guy reaching middle age, who never met his dreams, I am more willing than ever to see films that distract me from that, and to forgive a cheap effort.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I am trying to watch Temple Of Doom, and all I can see is the fate of so many films that have come out in the last 25 years. I feel robbed, not just my child eyes, but my adult eyes too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are great movies that are not artistic. This is where Harrison Ford comes in, because he was involved in some of the best. Not every movie has to be great, they can’t all be great, but sometimes they are epic. Sometimes because they were not planned by marketing agencies, or tested, they tap into a vein, someone's inner wonder of something remarkable. Sometimes they find an unknown icon. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But in recent times, the films that stand in for great are not actually great or epic. They are simply tableaus elaborated by visionary music video directors, made into hopeful-iconic pictures. They are forgettable fodder for our forgettable lives. There are more big set piece films a year than in my entire childhood nowadays, and yet they don't take up memory or cultural meaning like they once did. I still vividly remember line ups around the block for Superman. There's already been several big expensive sci-fi movies this year that captured no one's imagination--and it is still winter. <br />
<br />
One of the things I liked about Avatar, which is true whether one loved or hated it, is it was the only movie people talked about that winter, spring and summer. And some people were as affected by thinking about a race like the Na'avi as people at the end of the seventies were by thinking about Yoda.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-31320233508966516912011-03-09T23:06:00.013-05:002011-03-10T12:31:56.702-05:00It doesn't matter what colour your parachute is.<div class="MsoNormal">In the seventies the addictive boogie man was heroin. In the early eighties, it was cocaine. By the end of the eighties it was crack, or super economy cocaine, for the layman. There was a six week period, when journalists, lacking a new drug, tried to manufacture a new epidemic. They called it parachute.<br />
<br />
No drug user or addict ever called it this. It consisted of some mad scientist concoction that combined heroin and cocaine. It was predicated on a tried and true combo that addicts sometimes used, called the “speedball”, when it was called anything at all. For rough and ready end zone players, it provided the budda-bing of blow, cancelled the crash and instead provided the endless blue simmer of the nod afterward. It was pretty awesome, but sometimes killed people; like cars, shellfish and football.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I digress. All these drugs are paltry compared to the overwhelming success of television. Maybe The Shield was cocaine, and Six Feet Under was heroin. Perhaps sitcoms best represent crack. We deride, we equivocate, and we watch. We get our fix. Personal appetite or choice is unimportant, just tuning in. These are unreported narcotic epidemics.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Recently, I am seeing a formula that must be the elusive parachute that journalists so wanted to be on the forward wave of. I’m talking about the caustically funny yet dramatic soap opera. Otherwise known as the jab-jab-deep hook to the solar plexus that really hooks viewers. Almost everything in primetime now combines the mighty forces of humour and pathos. It’s brilliant, in a Brave New World way.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There is a really evocative scene in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. Our anti-hero and anti-heroine are traipsed languidly across a hotel bed. Perhaps it was a cigarette toss, I’m not sure, but the whole room lights up in flame. Foul mouthed Nancy sleeps away, and slack jawed Sid idles his head to the side, takes note of the flames climbing the drapes, and then attempts to drag, unsuccessfully from a cigarette and finally subsides. This scene may have been confusing to some. I get it, and I have the skin grafts to prove it. But more so, I really get a good analogy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are nearly one billion people who live the lap of luxury, largely based on colonialism and imperialism. Today, they do not worry about it, because it is simply efficient neoliberal business. The mantra is that it creates a rising tide that raises all ships. Who cares if it is true? Seinfeld is on. Both a good show and a celebrity bonfire are passions that drown out anything else.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There is a domino thing beginning in North Africa and the Middle East right now. It has more to do with food and security than a sudden fed-uppedness with ugly regimes. And it doesn’t end in far away places. Less bullety, the “western” world is witnessing every socially progressive thing that has happened in the last three hundred years collapse. And, newsflash, it isn’t because the republicans are evil and the democrats are lazy stoned leftists. It is because there are no new continents to exploit, no new ‘niggers’ to enslave, and no magic technologies to fix things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hindu farmers are committing suicide. Union workers are fighting in the streets of Wisconsin. Panhandlers are murdering in Toronto. Terrified politicians are fortifying wealth in ways no one alive has ever seen. Small minded people fear we will move back to a feudal system; they have no imagination about what is coming.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s kind of like the colossal fuckstorm that is an addict’s life. They deny everything, and try and hold the edges together with lies and short term fixes. Some even whistle innocence when everything goes down. I hate to say it, but addiction is a perfect analogy to understand a citizen or civilization today.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are two schools of thought on political power. One is numbers—say like the Hindu and Chinese(like ants, they can overpower the “evil” elites), and the other is the monetary base. History suggests that the numbers create revolutions that end in crazyhorse regimes, and that a middling monetary base hashes out whatever improvements it feels it needs to, gradually, and things improve. I ask where the west is now.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I come back to Parachute. Not the cocaine-heroin parachute; keen as it was, it just doesn’t play well with the majority. But man, tv, tv is gorgeous sexy tits orgasm when it comes to consuming people. Will the will of a marginally powerful people force civilization to make sensible decisions about the future? Not in a 500 channel universe.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I explicate the clumsy analogy of drugs because drugs are a billion dollar industry that disengages millions of people, most of them poor (and we all get that picture), while entertainment, with all it’s royalty is a hundreds billions dollar institution that nullifies the senses of an enormous chunk of those western people who are supposedly politically empowered.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There is a famous sound bite from Marx, “religion is the opiate of the people”. Setting aside that that quote is way out of context, I would say that opium is the opiate of the people, not religion. In other words, religion is a community institution that binds people together and often encourages them to ‘do good’ for communities far beyond their own back yards, while opium just puts us to sleep, alone in our armchairs. TV is opium. Doesn’t matter how clever it gets, how slick production values are, how wicked CGI is, it’s all about being on the nod. This is far more opiumous than religion. I’m not making this up, I went through a ‘church’ phase, and every one of them from sensible to wacky, to conservative to transcendental, they were all busy trying to make this supposed temporary earth better. That is not the sedating activity of a batman movie, or a new forensics crime procedural on tv.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What we consider “the world” is going down right now. It’s going down with a shortage of phosphorous, nitrogen and peat (if that doesn’t register, the other word is FOOD. and if you don't worry about fertilizer, compare the amount of articles that document a 5% increase in the price of oil versus the 300%-700% price increase in various fertilizer chemicals in the same period). It’s going down with an end to drunken energy. It’s going down with the rainforests that regulate oxygen. It’s going down with ocean life that rules earth’s food chain. It’s going down with the kind of war you can expect after three quarters of a century of wealth built on distributing arms to people who are angry and hungry. It’s going down to an atmosphere congested with pollutants that will not kill the earth, but will make it a piss poor home for life as we know it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And on top of all that, now you have to worry about Two and a Half Men being canceled. And the Oscar awards again awarding the wrong nominees, or failing to nominate the right ones at all. And House jumped the shark too far. And Sidney Sheldon started writing a different kind of junk book. And Lady Gaga is too mannish for your late Madonna fantasies. And goddamn it, I can’t find DVDs of Thundarr.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">The journalists who thought up ‘parachute’ were logical in their metaphor. They were just inaccurate because they weren’t users. We are all in our parachute addiction. We are pushing heart failure and lung failure, pushing at every end, and we want every benefit minus every cost. We want to burn white hot, and then be carried gently down. I’ve been hooked on everything that has a hook, and I am very impressed with the hook entertainment has. Imagine, it doesn’t just suppress revolution, but voting and even basic thought processes—and it doesn’t stop you from going to work in the morning--if you still have a job.</span></div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-86431258168032269612011-03-04T19:35:00.000-05:002011-03-04T19:35:18.022-05:00Kidnapping The Golden Age<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"><b> </b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Using metals as a designation for eras is a short hand for technological capability, i.e. Bronze Age, the Iron Age.<span> </span>In the never ending deification of technology, the paradigm portrays a civilization’s progress through metalworking, amassing strength, power and momentum.<span> </span>Somewhere along the way, the arts adopted a similar looking way of naming eras, except with the opposite implication, one of degradation: a weakening, a dilution and a loss of value.<span> </span>We’re all familiar with the notion of the “golden age of cinema”, despite it having little meaning.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Comic Books are categorized in a similar fashion: Golden Age – Silver Age – Bronze Age.<span> </span>I really don’t care for era headings that suggest an inexorable decline in quality, an inevitable decay.<span> </span>It’s pessimistic and inaccurate.<span> </span>There’s almost a religious self-loathing in the notion of an ideal time followed by a continuous fall from grace leading to the very bottom in the present.<span> </span>On a grand scale, time is most easily observed as the process of entropy, but that doesn’t translate culturally to the early days of an art form being wizardry, the Silver Age being vaudeville magic shows and the Bronze Age being an unshaven mug hustling card tricks on a street corner.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I suppose, part of the designation has literally to do with the antique collectible value of comic books and that has probably been the most destructive element for comics being part of the magic garden of childhood.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Something that really stands out about comics of yesteryear is a bold simplicity and earnest clarity of line and form; of character and story.<span> </span>It is easy to perceive earlier incarnations of comics as wielding a kind of purity and innocence—a golden age by way of Dylan Thomas sensibility.<span> </span>Those comics were definitely drawn for and priced for children, and yet, or maybe because of it, they are sort of timeless and ageless.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I hope children still read comic books, and read them with the intensity and immersion that I remember.<span> </span>But comics have matured in ways I sometimes find marvelous, but also ways that make me feel sad for the children.<span> </span>I sometimes feel like we loved our comics so much that we wanted to keep them for ourselves, making them more convoluted as we aged, bogging them down with an adult’s sense of continuity and complexity, not to mention an adult’s sense of interpersonal relationships. Along the way, we may have started to lose the idea that they were for children first.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">If far darker and more sophisticated storytelling is not barrier enough to children, there is also the price.<span> </span>Paper and printing cost more than they once did, and artists and writers are better paid than they once were, but there is an undeniable relationship between the price of comics and the audience.<span> </span>Pricing of a commodity is always based on the very most the market will bear.<span> </span>A ten year old cannot compete as a target market with a 45 year old middle manager whose life still revolves around the day of the week that the comics are shipped.<span> </span>From a business standpoint, that adult market is several cohorts, all more numerous than the dwindling children market, at least two generations into shrinking family size.<span> </span>Of course that neglects the great wisdom of churches and tobacco companies:<span> </span>hook ‘em while they’re young.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When I was a kid, most stores had a comic book rack—corner stores, grocery stores, pharmacies.<span> </span>A kid could independently go on his own quest for 4-colour magic and pay for it with allowance, couch scrounged change, or even by returning a few pop bottles pulled from the trash.<span> </span>Getting lost in cosmic adventures and heroic glory could be part of a private autonomous universe.<span> </span>In essence, children were pint sized hunters and gatherers.<span> </span>Today, virtually the only place to buy a comic book is a comic book store, a specialty shop for collectors and the obsessed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Today, rather than the subversive act making a pilgrimage on foot or bicycle to the comic rack—sometimes a literally transgressive act if the corner store was outside of a permitted radius from home—the kid has to petition a parent to bring them to the collector store.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There is more to it than just the loss of freedom.<span> </span>When I was a kid, I had no conception of comics being collected, financially evaluated and sealed away in little plastic vaults.<span> </span>It would never have occurred to me that an adult would read a comic book.<span> </span>Sure, by adolescence, in my hunger to read comics from before my time, I had discovered comic book stores.<span> </span>They were more of an oddity back then, seedier, kind of like the comic shop in the Simpsons.<span> </span>Back then, it was still common to see kids in these shops.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>In fact, as I reflect on it, I am probably of the first generation that was transitioned into being collectors while still youth, into a world that rabidly followed something akin to the stock market.<span> </span>I think if you were born ten years before me, the entire formative youth years could be enjoyed in a pristine state where comics were simply a pleasure and an escape.<span> </span>If you carried on reading them as an adult, it might still simply be a love of the comics even if the layers of pleasure evolved.<span> </span>The Overstreet Price Guide, a bible of the cape-and-tights financial market, dates back to my youngest years and no further.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Today, after a kid has convinced mom or dad to drive them to the place where comics are hoarded, and accessed a parental credit card--since the cover price on a single comic book ranges from $4-6 these days--there is still one more loss that subtracts from the riches of a child’s own space.<span> </span>The kid walks into a brightly lit boutique of dense cross merchandising.<span> </span>Expensive cross-merchandising.<span> </span>Aimed at adults.<span> </span>The kid knows it is aimed at adults, because there are no kids in the store.<span> </span>There is a table in the back, and four men in their early thirties are arguing about Pokemon.<span> </span>There are two men in expensive suits frantically looking for the newest issue of whatever.<span> </span>There’s another man leaning on the counter placing an order for a recent anime box set that comes with a “for mature audiences” rating.<span> </span>Three more guys in their late twenties are in the “toy” aisle drooling over comic hero figurines, which are the oversized, highly sculpted $60-and-up descendents of the $2 Star Wars action figures I grew up with.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The toys themselves shine a light on the intended market.<span> </span>The action figures I played with as a child were cheaply made, and cheap to buy.<span> </span>They didn’t have articulated joints, they were coloured poorly and tended to come from generic molds.<span> </span>To be frank, they look like crap to an adult.<span> </span>But that didn’t matter because no one was trying to sell them to adults.<span> </span>You have to remember, to a kid, a blanket propped up on a broom can be a hidden fortress, a cardboard box can be the Batmobile, and a small copse of trees can be Middle Earth.<span> </span>In comparison, action figures were pretty heady and intoxicating.<span> </span>We used them to wage campaigns and tell stories.<span> </span>We also used them to make rules and learn what rules were for.<span> </span>We unwittingly used them to develop into proper human beings (I forget who said, ‘it is the work of children to play’).<span> </span>Again, those toys were priced in a child’s budget, and available at any department store.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I stood in a comic store one day, with a friend, marveling at the artistry and detail of today’s toys, and we both got wistful thinking how amazing it must be to be a kid today.<span> </span>It only took a moment to realize we were missing the point.<span> </span>These toys were priced for adults, in a shop in the business district, and were meant to be left intact in the packaging and placed reverently on a shelf.<span> </span>More pointedly, I saw a human interest piece on TV a while back, about a nerdy couple and their vast toy collection.<span> </span>They gave the camera a loving tour of the climate controlled toy room and towards the end of the piece laughed that the only downside was their kid’s constant complaining that he wasn’t allowed to touch them.<span> </span>I’ll repeat, the child is not allowed to play with the toys, and they were laughing about it.<span> </span><span></span>It was ghoulish and frightening. These are the monsters of kid’s stories: the Grinches, Selfish Giants and the Hooded Fangs.<span> </span>Except in those stories, this kind of characteristic is a defect rectified by the end of the story.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It often seems the comics these toys are based on have gone the same way.<span> </span>Adults, sequestering and hoarding childhood, simultaneously transforming it into something with no more child-like wonder and ironically, no longer intended for children.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I started off on this tangent thinking about a super hero television show called The Cape.<span> </span>I’m surprised it hasn’t already been pulled from the air, considering the amount of vitriol, disdain and hate it’s getting.<span> </span>It’s gloriously ham-fisted, bombastically over the top, and gleefully nonsensical.<span> </span>It’s a bit stilted, a little bit purple and is filled with rogues on both sides of the good and evil equation.<span> </span>It reminds me of everything wondrous about any comic book that comes from the golden age, or the early days of the silver age.<span> </span>In this sense, it is very perfect and very precious.<span> </span>Adults (who watch super hero shows) hate it.<span> </span>I don’t mean it doesn’t take their fancy and so they watch something else; I mean they hate it and want it off the air.<span> </span>These are the same people who want each and every comic book movie to be darker, grittier, edgier.<span> </span>It doesn’t occur to them, that the hero--The Cape--fills an urgent need for the little boy character on the show.<span> </span>The tales and the way the tales are depicted are for kids.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s nothing wrong with enjoying childish things—have you ever watched adults in a Toys’R’Us store?<span> </span>But there is something terribly tragic about clinging to childhood loves so desperately that they are warped out of any shape where they are still in fact for children.<span> </span>The funny thing too, is that the broad strokes and simplistic stories and the private child spaces allowed a mythic-ness that is the very reason we retain an abiding love for the form.<span> </span>It’s the reason those old comics can be read with innocent pleasure or with rich analysis.<span> </span>Will today’s comic culture germinate an abiding love in today’s children?</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-65620599524976308152011-02-25T23:07:00.001-05:002011-02-26T03:30:39.439-05:00To Hell With The Nefarious Sharing Of Social Costs.<div class="MsoNormal">So many momentous things happening in the world: the horrible tragedy of the quake in New Zealand, the undulating ripple of change in the Middle East, the first acrid taste of a new wave of oil shocks, it’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So, I will avoid all that. I’m thinking more about the stink in the air about metering bandwidth in Canada. I am not sure why it is news or controversy, because to my knowledge, all the big players have been metering for ages. But for some reason, right now, amidst all the other crazy stuff going on, metering is a big deal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Humble ape that I am, I am coming out in support of metering. Think about it: while I am busy as an asshole pirate-downloading 50 years worth of Coronation Street, my neighbor, a sweet old gramma on a fixed income barely navigates three emails per month containing lo-res pics of the newest tots in her clan. Why in hell should we pay the same rate?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am not concerned by the fact that the big providers have admitted they have bandwidth to spare for ten times the amount of traffic we have today. I am not concerned that they only seek a way to market discrete increases in bandwidth. I’m just really mad that some people use more than other people, and yet everyone gets charged the same. I hate that, it’s like someone gets a freebie. It’s like everyone bands together and some people profit more.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I wholeheartedly support metering. Of course, I am one of those ugly consistent people. I like the idea of metering so much, I would like it applied to everything. I understand that internet is a utility, but, in today’s world, it is also an essential communication tool. Seriously, try and function in the modern world without internet. But I don’t really care about what is essential or common to all, I just want metering.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As you use, so shall you pay. Mantra gold or maybe golden mantra. I could almost get tea party donations for this.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A gross amount of my taxes go towards roads. I do not own a car, nor do I drive. I would never consider it a good idea to opt out, because someday I may need a taxi, an ambulance, or a police car and they require roads. Just the same, I do not place wear and tear on roads the way drivers do. So, in all fairness, why can’t we meter driving? My tax bill could go down, and for heavy drivers, bills could go up.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Another big suck on my money is healthcare. Some people use lots of healthcare. Breeders, with their childbirth and sick kids suck the hell out of things. And old people who don’t smoke ride that rail for decades of plastic joints, heart medicine and cancer eradication, not to mention lying stupid in a bed in an old folks home. And then there are the gays and drug addicts, constantly creating black holes in healthcare dollars. I like this metering system, where I could bypass all that expense at the cost of others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Speaking of breeders, there is the whole business of schools. Whether I have no children, one child, or seven children, I pay the same amount of tax because some bleeding heart thought that education would profit us all. Yeah, whatever. If we metered education tax to match offspring, those who use more would rightfully pay more, instead of freeloading on my tax dollar. Don’t talk to me about what those educated tots could do for me, I'm just not interested because that is about later and i am about now.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For that matter, I never call the police, I would like to opt out of paying for that too. Let the user pay. I used the fire department once, my best friend never has, but we pay the same tax.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In fact, now that I have thought this through to its logical conclusion, I realize that there is no basis for community or pooling of resources. I dismiss organizing communities to facilitate good healthy functioning safe productive spaces as pie in the sky leftist drivel.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">We already meter electricity and heating energies, both absolutely essential to surviving in a northern clime. Or in other words we already say, you are only allowed to survive if you earn a sufficient amount of money. Let’s embrace our credo, let’s fully embrace economic Darwinism. I never use the phone, therefore I want people who use the phone more than I do to pay more. It’s only fair.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ok, ok, I’ve gotten ridiculous in my analogy. But consider, bandwidth is like a great big pipe. You pay your ISP for access to the pipe. They aren’t costed more by your usage(seriously, they aren't and they have admitted it), but they can make big money if they demonize the people who spend more time on the internet, and they can exclude poor people from the basic right to apply for a job, since that is the only way it is done now. They can convince you that a commodity you use is rare, when it is not and make us all feel greedy about how much of the interent we get, and leery of others who are 'freeloading' off of us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Oil is precious and rare, bandwidth is not. Both capitalist and socialist communities have to figure out what to do about oil, but not bandwidth. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Communities and societies are real, despite what Thatcher declared. Humans are pack animals and have always pooled resources. But he people with a lot of money would like more money—I don’t know why, after all, once your needs are met, it’s just numbers. It’s one of those things I just don’t understand.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">If you are an average citizen, what way do you really want to vote about anything that is socialized? Your vote against socialization either penalizes you or a relative or a friend, or a nieghbour that you don’t know but might need in the future. Your vote for socialization ensures that whatever size the pot of goods is, it is divvyed to everyone as needed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Internet service is not exactly a noble place to make a stand, but it does illustrate a point. Very wealthy people are quite canny about turning us against our neighbours so they can profit. Next time that you use a service of any kind—roads, sewage, medical assistance, garbage pick up, schools, the bloody post office, think about the contributions of people you will never meet, who make it possible because they believed in pooling resources. They believed in spending some of their resources on things that profited you more than themselves, in hopes that you might do the same for them.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-91081862490400943812011-02-17T11:29:00.000-05:002011-02-17T11:29:49.773-05:00The Wayback Wayback Machine<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Once, when I was green and golden, young and aspiring, I had a friend who I only held for a few short years.<span> </span>He was erudite beyond his years.<span> </span>The funniest thing about him other than the fact that he drank coffee from a mason jar and when he accidentally tipped a cigarette ash into his jar, covered the fact by sipping up and declaring that cigarette ash could enhance the flavor of coffee, the funniest thing was that in his abstract world of linguistics and philosophy he taught me to love nature. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Most of the time that I knew him, I never saw his nature side.<span> </span>Only because I am stupid.<span> </span>He lived in a tiny room and other than a clothing rack and urn sized ashtray, his room was a tropical jungle of plants.<span> </span>I don’t mean on the window sill and table, I mean there were rack shelves devoted to plants.<span> </span>The entire room was devoted to plants.<span> </span>We had to crowd into a dark corner where the chairs were set, outside of the sunlight.<span> </span>And when I think back, the room he chose in that great old rooming house was the room with the best sunlight.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We used to drink coffee like it was beer and smoke cigarettes like they would get us high.<span> </span>And talk about Wiggenstein and Chomsky. We’d crash Turgenev up against Kerouac and modify with Feynman.<span> </span>Mostly I listened, because he always talked over my head.<span> </span>I was a headstrong, arrogant youth, always drunk on my own smarts, but with him, I always felt ignorant and slow witted.<span> </span>It would be a cliché elder mentor story, except he was the same age as I.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">I can’t even imagine what he got from my own stupid opinionated grunts.<span> </span>Sometimes I think he craved my insanity.<span> </span>Who else would jump off a building with him, or make 3am plant stealing runs?<span> </span>I certainly couldn’t keep up in the cerebral department.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He taught me Hegel and Heidegger.<span> </span>He taught me to question Alan Watts.<span> </span>He taught me to love but mistrust Nietzsche.<span> </span>When I couldn’t understand his monologues on linguistics, he played me the Talking Heads as though that would make it all clear.<span> </span>To this day, as much as I like their music, I keep thinking there is an encoded message that I cannot hear.<span> </span>Maybe only he heard it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">His modesty was overwhelming.<span> </span>He took a year off after highschool, not to “find himself”, but because he didn’t feel sufficiently prepared for university and wanted to “read up”.<span> </span>I hadn’t attended university, but I presciently told him, “you already know more than most grads”.<span> </span>He didn’t listen, he just kept misting his plants and reading advanced linguistic texts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If that was the end of the story, he would still be one of the greatest people I ever knew.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But one spring, he asked me to come on a survival canoe trip he did every year, up past North Bay.<span> </span>I interpreted the invite as for a camping trip and accepted since I rarely had opportunity to get out of the city.<span> </span>I paid little attention to the fact that he started training in a gym, other than that his skinny body suddenly popped with lean muscle. (I exercised both envy and laziness in this regard)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I met his father on a stop off before the trip.<span> </span>He was the sort of man who would either hammer a son into pudding or steel.<span> </span>Sink or swim.<span> </span>I suddenly understood my friend better.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We got dropped, with heavy packsacks and canoes into wilds I had never even conceived of.<span> </span>It was fourteen hour days of paddling and portaging, withstanding swarms of biting insects, making and breaking camp every day, and often enough, sleeping on rock (dead exhausted sleep).<span> </span>Two things stood out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">I saw a different side of him, hitherto hidden, a scampering, wild-eyed nature born being who was utterly adapted to the unkempt and intraversable, and who you would never think of as a person who read philosophy.<span> </span>For kicks, he would pirouette the canoe while we were gasping for breath on the rocks.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The other thing, was after a couple of days, I never wanted to return to “the city” or ideas.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He had tried to show me his true world (where he grew up, where his imagination fled to) and demonstrate how it funded him.<span> </span>The only thing my small mind took from it was, why leave?<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span></span>This was an eden beyond civilization, and even beyond the majority of most campers.<span> </span>The only people who had been here before us were the odd fur traders.<span> </span>It was sufficiently unpleasant to dissuade most.<span> </span>We scaled cliffs carrying our canoes. <span> </span>I had to grip canyon sides, covered in spiders (and I am normally very spiderphobic), or else we would be dashed on rocks in river flow. As much as my life has been trepiditious, this is as close as i ever got to epic.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s all kind of unreal now.<span> </span>And I still remember not wanting to leave, and him having to explain that we were learning things to bring back.<span> </span>It was like he had shown me the universe and then said we had to live in a bunker.<span> </span>Thereafter, his tiny room, clotted with plants and cigarette smoke seemed even more mysterious.<span> </span>How did this visionary cope? What did his eyes see?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A year later, I was on the opposite side of the country and phoned him in the middle of the night, addled on drugs and booze, to say I love you, and worried he might think it some homosexual thing that neither of us were.<span> </span>He replied, so nonchalantly, “Of course *Idle*, I love you too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Five years later, we ran into each other on a boulevard in Montreal, buying bootleg liquor out of the trunk of a car, and spent the night drinking and talking, sitting on a sidewalk curb. (ahhh, montreal stories).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ten years later, we had a beer, then two, then a coffee, while commiserating about the things we hadn’t achieved and the things we missed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So, that is what time does to the majesty of magical moments.<span> </span>I am still stuck in a city.<span> </span>I don’t know where my friend is.<span> </span>I do court the love of many plants in my little room, and feel good that I have nurtured a tiny bud of a succulent into an overgrown two foot tall monstrosity.<span> </span>In a good year, I cultivate then eat a good garden.<span> </span>In a bad year, my plants are kind enough not to die</div><div class="MsoNormal">.</div><div class="MsoNormal">His email name was waybackwayback.<span> </span>Even back in the day before the internet took off.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">This wayback wayback machine operation is dedicated to him.</span>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-88153870799568542512011-02-01T02:31:00.000-05:002011-02-01T02:31:10.789-05:00CBRIII #2-3: Little Things and Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffery Brown<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal">Jeffery Brown is a bit of an enigma.<span> </span>In photos, he looks a big strapping handsome man of Scandinavian descent and he has a MFA from a prominent school.<span> </span>But his fame and stock in trade are crude uncertain drawings depicting a small boyish person consumed by neurosis.<span> </span>A self proclaimed autobiographist, he purports to render a relative truth.<span> </span>I guess he could be lying.<span> </span>Or else, his drawing style, his self personification, and the clipped moments of insecure life he depicts might demonstrate the vulnerability in us all.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m a long time fan of brown’s work, and I often have a hard time putting my finger on anything justifiable about it.<span> </span>It’s easier to say it is badly drawn and overly focused on teen-age like melodrama than to argue for it being penetrating, engaging and memorable.<span> </span>For that reason, if I had guilty pleasures, his work would be in that bag.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But for the most part, Brown does remarkable things.<span> </span>He displays great humility in not justifying his protagonist.<span> </span>He also teases out an earnestness, a sincerity that cuts through the distanced hipster stance that might be expected among his peers.<span> </span>He’s never short of a humour with warmth and intimacy, never lowers himself to a cheap or bitter laugh.<span> </span>He allows moments to hang in the air.<span> </span>He allows things to be unsaid.<span> </span>He’ll take a risk trying to convey pages in a single glance.<span> </span>And as portrayed, he’s danmned likable.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All that said, Little Things was tremendously disappointing.<span> </span>I felt I had been conned into purchasing cast off half starts.<span> </span>Meaningful silence was replaced with empty moments.<span> </span>Carefully ugly drawings were replaced with overworked pages depicting nothing.<span> </span>Stories that end hung in a precious moment were replaced with fitful cut offs that made no sense and engendered no feeling.<span> </span>I highly recommend not buying it ever, unless you are a die-hard fan/stalker type.<span> </span>(I’m not that type, I was just ignorant of the book).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Now, all that said, Funny Misshapen Body rolled off the press a year later and delivered not just the Brown I love, but a more mature and reflective Brown. A balance of stories, in his usual anti-chronological way that swirl together to create a full novelistic image of people, places and developments, working with new themes, and yet tied to the old and magnifying the scope of his storytelling.<span> </span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s also a greater range in the artwork, combining the early simple scrawl with the burdened later ink.<span> </span>We see the rest of Brown’s protagonist’s life (I realize that is cumbersome, but I differentiate between an author and his alter ego): his childhood experiences, his life with art, his schooling, a troubled medical history, his jobs, his solo adventures.<span> </span>We see the Brown who isn’t simply hung up on a girl. And it is captivating.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Brown’s “love trilogy” sold because he underlined every unsaid thing that never makes it to relationship stories, but that we all relate to.<span> </span>He could easily keep selling books on this ‘schtick’.<span> </span>But instead there is this incredible expansion.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t know how to reconcile the two books.<span> </span>I suppose one way would be to say I read them both in two days, some 700+ pages of work—the same pace for both the book that made me angry I spent money on, <span> </span>as the one that was warm and alive in my hands.<span> </span>Could be my mood, I am mercurial. Either way, I was compelled to read on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All of brown’s stories always have to do with a shortlist of topics—loneliness, connection, love affairs, struggle and confusion, strife and understanding.<span> </span>His recent stories paint a vivid portrait of the young man as an artist rather than the artist as a young man and that has added a dimension to the tale.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I hesitate, but will compare his work to the Alec tales of Eddie Campbell, who also utilized a difficult style of drawing and catalogued random, sometimes pointless and often humiliating experiences and worked up an unmatched magnum opus of growth and life.<span> </span>Brown has a long ways to go to reach up to those heights, but then he has a lot of time too.<span> </span>I think Jeffery Brown is still just getting started and still just shaking off the discomfort of youth.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-23623689225269000632011-01-26T19:14:00.009-05:002011-01-27T10:50:36.902-05:00CBRIII #1: Trickster, An Anthropological Memoir by Eileen Kane<div class="MsoNormal">Eileen Kane is a professional anthropologist, with the fieldwork to prove it, but she made her mark in the world educating the rest of us shmucks, not the cognoscenti. I think that was probably more valuable to us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Her memoir of her first foray into fieldwork is replete with humour, detail and wisdom.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She spins the tale of a young female anthropologist venturing out with insecurity into a male dominated world, in 1964, right after her marriage, risking everything, including the cross looks from folk in her home town.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am not an anthropologist, but if I was, I would prescribe this book as a primer to let people know how different the classroom is from the sloppy mess of real life. Even for the anthro students, it paints a vivid picture of the changes going on in that field at the time. She is sent to catalogue a language, make a census, and categorize a people. Instead, she plunges deep into the qualitative world of understanding a people.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I will not reveal anything of her journey here, except to say that like any transformative journey, trickster was along side. Here, you can just taste the beginning.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She arrives in a tiny impoverished town, to interview and catalogue the Paiute Indians. She may as well have parachuted. She is on her own, her letters of passage are lost, or hidden by mischievous helpers. The only thing provided by her university is a vehicle, and they provide a labeled police car. Very useful in earning the trust of her subjects.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No one adopts her in the cinematic fashion. Everyone toys with her, and the children follow her and ply her with lies. The elderly tempt her with hints of history and language, constantly delaying so as to retain the company and amusement. They mislead her and send her on dead end hunts with their mytho tales.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And there is no malice. The narrative weaves itself into a world where everyone plays at being simple country folk while all having, if not nefarious agendas, complicated and playful agendas. They are heartfelt in wanting to help her, but it is the definition of help that is in question. They dole out lore ever so slowly, as if enjoying her hunt. They delight when she sweats about not being able to get her answers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Kane uses the powerful tool of reflection to juxtapose the history of her own colourful town, and her emerging feminist awakenings with the stories she learns in the dusty town.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I cannot attest to whether she is a good anthropologist, but I can say she is a master of layering the complexity of experience and fully imbuing it with the mighty spirit of the trickster. In this volume we get an ethnography of the Paiute, a coming of age tale, a story of feminist coming out, mischievous and magical tales of coyote, and a sober reflection of lessons learned young as reviewed by an elder.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I feel lucky to have only accidentally discovered this book (trickster laughs). I am working hard at selling it to a professor for a paper. I’d say wish me luck, but I can hear the snickering and trust the wind to go where it wants.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Find it here:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Trickster-An-Anthropological-Memoir-Eileen-Kane/9781442601789-item.html?ikwid=eileen+kane&ikwsec=Home">Chapters</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trickster-Anthropological-Memoir-Eileen-Kane/dp/1442601779/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296086448&sr=1-1">Amazon</a></div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-90288061149292287492011-01-19T22:58:00.000-05:002011-01-19T22:58:18.456-05:00High School in the Eighties.<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal">I went to a progressive high school.<span> </span>It had tiered classes, to adapt to student readiness(that was eventually quashed as some kind of Ayn Randiness).<span> </span>It also had art, drama, philosophy and religion classes to complement the gym and shop classes.<span> </span>I don’t know why they chose our school; we were a violent gang ridden school.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was lucky to pass some time there as a youth.<span> </span>I didn’t manage to graduate from that school, that came seven schools later.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But that isn’t this story.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">In my first bout of high school, I drew up a carefully prepared presentation in my religion class using Chicken Shit Conformists, by the Dead Kennedys, as the soundtrack. We devised an entire primitive religion and acted it out. The entire scripture was based on the characters dim memories of the last burning light bulb.<span> </span>It was a world of people trying to make sense of a world they didn’t understand. They prayed to fixtures and outlets.<span> </span>And they were afraid to venture into the outside world—it was too big and too bright, and so they cowered in the bowels of an abandoned high school and built myths based on shadows and emptiness. And so generations passed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The power went out during our "performance" and the PA sounded an ominous deep voice asking "Are you there? I need you to listen". We worked it in to great dramatic effect.<span> </span>Our primitive practitioner dropped everything he was doing and stared skyward at the voice.<span> </span>The pronouncement ended and our heroic primitive was no more informed.<span> </span>He eventually braved the outside world and then returned to try and tell his people that they were lost in an empty space, and that they could have freedom in an Eden.<span> </span>They killed him.<br />
<br />
My teacher let us finish up and then shuffled us off to the office and we were failed. Too bad, we worked hard on it. We had based it on the Old Testament and Platonic Philosophy (and some old punk know how). Oh well, youth!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This anecdote sums up my feelings about the relevance of high school.<span> </span>You don’t even need a diploma to get into university.<span> </span>If I would have known that back then, sheesh.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-42315229962799595512011-01-12T23:23:00.159-05:002011-01-15T14:10:27.885-05:00Freddie Mercury Was My First Punk Influence.<div class="MsoNormal">In my early teens, alienated and filled with dread, repressed and tightly wound, I discovered punk. It was the catalyst my brimming frustration hadn't known it was waiting for and it was transformative.<br />
<br />
The music was full of rage, yet often exalting. Swirling, sufi-like in a feverish mosh pit could only be described as rapturous. It was fury and violence and a cathartic release of anguish. and it was jubilant and fraternal. Like for so many other odd uncomfortable kids, it was a lifeline.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I desperately wanted in, in a way I never had before. Like it's sound, punk had a raw and angry look to it so I immediately set about building my new facade. Iconoclasm and anti-conformism were clarion calls of the day so I didn't know that there was an accompanying uniformity to the uniform.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One of my early fashion moves, ripping into do-it-yourself punk, was to buy a Queen patch and sew it on my jean jacket. I had found it at a “head” shop while on an early foray into the downtown scene. Queen seemed to embody the same kind of bursting out feeling and raw power that I was now finding in punk. I had no idea what was punk and what was not. It seemed to me that was the point.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Wasn't this kind of punkish? :</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">So, my clumsy sweaty hands sewed my patch on. Off I went, proud, into the night, to launch myself, now adorned, into the punk fray.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps you see where this is going?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was dragged out of the pit, and several older guys held me down, kicked the snot out of me and then tore off my beloved Queen patch. Then they threw me back in after calling me a fag. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I didn’t understand what that word meant, though I had been called it before. I didn't understand what had just happened. In my mind, I tried to make it an initiation. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Luckily, a few years later, queen made things </div><div style="text-align: center;">clearer for the exceptionally obtuse:</div><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Late that night, stumbling away into the night with my two friends, we deliriously relived our adventures, and our wounds, and I didn’t know what to say about the whole business with the Queen patch. We had already built up a religion, fueled by Robert Heinlein and John Lennon, and punk was its new home. This was our great violent alienated love. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I never did learn to fit in, but punk gradually learned to fit me in, one bruise at a time. I did eventually learn what fag meant. Punk's early homophobia is ironic in hindsight of one of it's elder statesmen, Jello Biafra, eventually coming out. It wasn't the only time i ended up on the wrong side of fists for transgressing some gender role rule that I was unaware of. I used to resist arguing, 'but I'm not gay' because that seemed to legitimate the activity by only rejecting the identification process.<br />
<br />
Punks eventually built a culture of tolerance, like a reservation for everyone who had been turned away elsewhere and the violence usually came from without, not within. There was enough open season on punks without us hunting each other as well. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It almost makes no sense now, what with all the violence and addiction and crime, but it was a precious time in life. Of course it wasn't a sensible time, it was a visceral time. Everyone acting freely, if impulsively. Little tribes cleaving together. A bughouse band living by our wits. Punk ceased to be a form of music and became more of a mantra about being.<br />
<br />
I cherish those times and occasionally go on nostalgic punk music benders. But to tell the truth, a quarter century later, I listen to Freddie Mercury far more often than Black Flag or The Accused. And while i will always hear a little punk in Queen, that's way too small a label for their sound and his voice.</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-26309665072770666142010-12-28T14:37:00.007-05:002013-08-04T09:22:58.311-04:00A Christmas Story<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">Christmas is not my favorite time of the year. In fact, other than getting all mental about finding perfect gifts, I would be happy to do away with it forever. But if I look back, and dig through this primates treasure chest of memories, there is one that sticks out. This is the story of Christmas of 1988.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It was a bitter winter, not a lot of snow, but biting winds, kind of like this year. I remember it well because I was homeless at the time, so other than escaping into a mall, briefly before security kicked me out, the evil wind was all I knew.<br />
<br />
Every one of us criminals and urchins knew every corner that offered respite from the wind, and we jockeyed for place in our hidey spaces. It was so bad that people fought over alley ways. No one was mean; it was simply the difference between being cold and dying. Not one of us felt being in a house was an option.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">We were a rag-tag bunch of punk and metal youth, old war veteran winos and the homeless crazy population (made homeless that year by a change in the law). Everyone had been working overtime panhandling, pulling double shifts in the cold wind, because there are more shoppers out that time of year, and they sometimes feel more inclined to give.<br />
<br />
Between the holiday spirit/guilt and our shivering blue fingers, it was a veritable gold rush in the panhandler belt. Even those of us that possessed excellent theft skills, sometimes came out on the street to reap the wealth of a populace that suddenly felt benevolent to us. I even remember one guy, who we all feared because he was violent, and even he gave up “rolling” (violent muggings) to come panhandling with us.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It’s lost on understanding today, but we even wrapped presents for each other. Mostly it was strange stuff that suited someone, or crazy things people believed in. One of my friends collected 317 bottlecaps and wrapped them for a girl he was in love with. She thought bottle caps were the only way to save a human soul and cried when she opened his gift. (As an aside, she never accepted his love).</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">We weren’t alone. During the so-called “fatcat” years of government, there were social agencies tasked with helping us out. Mostly this was silly money pseudo-spent, and scary bureaucrats running the programs. But there were a couple of people who really felt for the strange addled people of the street.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">In December of 1988, budgets were being slashed, people were being fired. It was completely a duck and cover situation. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Everyone had an excuse to forget us on the street.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I hate to have memory die, and most of my memories seem to be dying—aging or killed brain cells, who knows? I am trying to remember back then, the lone social worker who was trying to save us from ourselves that night, and who forsook his own Christmas to be down in the trenches with us. His name was James Mullen. He did not take the easy way out.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Its troubling to think of him now. He was, at the time, in his mid thirties, past troubles with alcohol himself, and totally devoted to trying to make the streets less lethal to us; he was grumpy and impatient and a growly brother to us all. he was a great bear on the street filled with a spirit i can barely describe. Now, I am in the same age bracket and wonder what I have accomplished. James may have very well saved me from myself or the streets. I’m not sure I have given back.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I don’t know what the streets are like now, they seem cold and vicious with crack, but maybe it only looks that way because I am now a citizen, and just see scary street people. But back then, we were dropping off like flies: suicide, overdose, car accidents. James was trying to instill a sense of life into us. He was trying to save us.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">On that wintery 1988 night, boisterous James rallied every one of us: stinking kids, limping drunk vets and even the crazy folk; and we went to the movies. Yes, having no hearth to go to, James brilliantly came up with the idea of the magic shadows for us. It was a long pilgrimage down Rideau Street, constantly collecting our fallen. I stumbled along, and someone put acid in my mouth to keep me going. The theatre didn’t even want to let us in, and James had to vouch for all of us so we could go. It was on his ass if we behaved badly—and badly was our specialty.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">And we couldn’t quiet ourselves down, couldn’t behave like citizens; we were just too excited. We were like a mange of animals, and we laughed and caroused throughout the film. . None of us thanked him, we ran off to the next mania of the night. But we all stayed alive, and we got to cavort in a togetherness that we should have had but rarely did. It was Christmas. And thanks to James, every forgotten soul got to feel good at Christmas that year. In retrospect, I only feel sad that we abandoned him after, after all, he too was a lonely soul. I hope he took pleasure in our zoo-like frenetic.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">In 1988, James acted as our shepherd, and distracted us from the holocaust of pain that is the alone, demon plagued, homeless person on christmas eve. And while never being saccharine or paternal, brought us all to a theatre, and made us feel like we were together. When I try and summon a warm feeling for Christmas, it is back to that year that I remember. That is my nativity.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-28917433697427366232010-12-16T21:43:00.002-05:002011-02-01T02:53:36.570-05:00Cannonball III<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><a href="http://www.pajiba.com/">Pajiba</a>, the site of Scathing Reviews and Bitchy People, annually commences a marathon of reading—peculiar if you ask me as it distracts from watching movies and television, which is their main source of bread and butter—and it is that time of year: <a href="http://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/oh-yeah-baby-its-on-cannonball-read-iii-hope-springs-eternal.php">The Cannonball Read 3.0</a></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Anyone and everyone are encouraged to join in.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The seed idea is to read 52 books over the course of a year and post a review of each book to a blog. The review doesn’t have to meet London Review standards. It can be just a few paragraphs about the book and what the reader thought of it. Pajiba provides links to all the nerdy bookworm’s blogs, and once or twice a week will post a particularly yummy review up on Pajiba. For every participant who uploads 52 book reviews to a blog, Pajiba makes a donation to the education fund for the child of beloved passed-away member, Alabama Pink who was an inspired reader and eloquent commenter on the site. By the time that kid grows up, not only will a hoard of strangers get her to college, but said hoard will be less illiterate and more connected too.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Evolving to address the needs of a busy overtaxed populace, the Cannonball Read wants everyone who ever has ink stained fingers to feel welcome and will accommodate those who only feel bold enough to shoot for a half(26) or quarter(13) cannonball. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I believe, the idea is that even if you only manage to read and write on 3 books over the course of a year, that’s still pretty cool, literate, and interactive. Unlike job interviews and dodging traffic, at Cannonball success is inconsequential and effort and enthusiasm are everything. Completion is just gravy.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">When I was only knee-high to a house, I used to read 2-3 books a week, but then other responsibilities kicked in and knocked it back to less than 1 per week. Recent years of exhaustion have driven me to that ultimate narcotic, the television, and I am lucky if I read a dozen books in a year that are not scholastically related. So, in a fit of disgust for my cathode ray wallowing filth (what, I can’t afford a flat screen), I’ve signed on to the good ship Cannonball. I am one lazy sumbitch so I am holding firm on the enthusiasm clause.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Feel free to follow or join in. Crack open a book, and like Pandora famously quipped, “What harm can just opening it do?”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-56679688932129853742010-12-10T16:50:00.060-05:002010-12-14T18:14:22.077-05:00Bah, The Humbug<div class="MsoNormal">I recently shared some email convo with a good friend. I asked him to come see a theatre showing of It's A Wonderful Life, put on specially for Christmas. For me, it is a favorite film, loved unconditionally. But I never thought of it from his point of view. Then he told me how the movie looked to him. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I now feel sort of embarassed. This movie is truly about my buddy. The little guy that keeps working and never took the big dollar or the easier path. The little guy who makes a difference and gets little recognition. The little guy who could use an angel to tell him how the shit is. I watch this every year feeling all goopy inspired and yet I am a shiftless pisspot, while my friend is the hardest working guy I know. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I'm sure some people might roll their eyes because my bud is vociferous in his complaining about how the world works, but unlike so many other complainers, he actually works in the system and tries to make it better. So, in my book, he actually has more of a leg to stand on when it comes to being frustrated.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I bawl my eyes every year to It's A Wonderful Life. I bought my own copy so I wouldn’t have to rely on cable to play it. I even shed my tears for at least half a dozen other Frank Capra heart grabbers about the enduring little good guy now that dvd makes them available. Yet, I give little thought to the mythology or other christmas mythologies we get out of our hearth-like light boxes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I watched the christmas episode of Warehouse 13, a light actiony sci-fi show. It was a stand alone Christmas episode independent of it's series run. It was warm and saccharine and played out a modern myth of the busy wealthy business man who provides for, but isn’t present for his kids.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s the opposite of the box-office failure that Wonderful Life was. This man has a family, but is too busy improving the world(through designing shopping malls) to spend time with them. In today's mythology, the demands of the evil corporation has robbed the man of his family and values. He is too busy making money to treasure his family. Not really a Scrooge, just engulfed in an economic system Despite his pure motives of earning for his children, they are left behind. This is the polar opposite of Jimmy Stewart who was focused on making his small town livable, one home at a time, inspired by and shored up by his family. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Today, I question both myths. I wonder, thinking of my classic movie and this new tv show, which is suited to reality today? Are families wealthy beyond reason and lacking their fathers who are slaves to the boardroom? Are hard working men without recognition out there making the world a better place? Or are fathers unemployed and sometimes cast out of their homes? Or underpaid humiliated peons to the service industry? How many dads are still employed in these fantasy jobs envisioned in christmas specials? How much of the Credit Crisis stems from families stressfully trying to make christmas as bountiful as it looks on tv. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Jimmy Stewart was sweating to bail out poor families back when his company was threatened by a local rich company The fantasy was that the people actually supported him because of all he had done for them. Today, big companies reap untold wealth by robbing us of our lives while still we vote for governments that serve them. They are enriched while our families shatter. We are left with a sham dream of glitz and wealth and no community to fall back on</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I'm always a crank, first to shout foul at the universe. I've even just curmudgeoned my own holiday favorite. Ah well, that's me. <br />
<br />
My little Christmas rant goes out warmly to my friend who actually does the work that keeps my world going and always does his best regardless of a mistifyingly indifferent populace. Hey man, you know who you are, merry tidings!.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-75422180645734668642010-11-24T20:53:00.047-05:002010-11-26T21:59:35.187-05:00I Believe. . .American Thanksgiving is upon us. I came across a column suggesting that the things that we are truly thankful for are<i> things we believe in</i>. It asked readers to respond, not with thanks, but with statements of belief.<br />
<br />
In recent years I have felt my beliefs shattered by various tolls my life has collected and it would have been much easier for me to drum up a simple thank you for something inconsequential than find and declare a heartfelt belief. This in itself is disturbing on reflection. So, I struggled with this one, and here is that struggle:<br />
<br />
<b>I Believe . . .</b><br />
<br />
I believe in the healing power of cartoons, of childlike glee in stories, in colour, in magic, in possibility.<br />
<br />
I believe in the beauty of solitude, the fortitude of good friends and the curative bloom generated by intimacy. I believe in abiding resilience during the absence of solitude, good friends and intimacy.<br />
<br />
I believe milk is not only an excellent source of nutrition but also soul pleasing manna from the gods. Only fools relegate it to children.<br />
<br />
I believe Jazz encompasses the neediest depths of subversion and the loftiest cries to the Numen. I believe Jazz will always speak to me when words have failed.I believe Jazz holds when my circle is broken.<br />
<br />
I believe we, humanity collected, are nigh on either a revolution of cooperative austerity or else a nightmare of violent competition in proportions that history has never imagined.<br />
<br />
I believe taking my crap out on others spreads a virulent malaise, and that the slightest gesture I make in compassion or even amiability is a twice as virulent benevolence. I believe this is important to remember when considering whether to smile in any situation.<br />
<br />
I believe Trickster is exquisitely comfortable in the paradox of guiding me to be a better self while at the same time constantly tossing me to the wolves for entertainment's sake. I believe Trickster doesn't hold with karma (just as well in my instance) but does believe in the instructive nature of serendipity, mischief, satire, graveyard humour and the intrinsic value of every pathway. I believe Trickster always has time to either snicker at me or pick me up, or both. I believe He never gives up and for all his tomfoolery, he never casts judgment.<br />
<br />
I believe in endurance. People say fail and fail again at worthy tasks. I say, there is no shame in beckoning off of pain and suffering, yet, if I should happen to keep plodding there is always such curious wonder to experience in failure or success. If through even no fault of my own, I come through a storm, I hold riches to lay before me and carry into the next storm.<br />
<br />
I believe that the lowly ant that turns our soil and the lowly plankton that conjures our atmosphere are far more important than our legends and myths, and infinitely more important than our politics and economics. I pray we honour them and not snuff them out.<br />
<br />
I believe music both relieves me of my emotional turmoil and opens doorways to me when I have cloistered myself from such vital meaning. Music is the easiest thing I can point to to support a spiritual argument.<br />
<br />
I believe, at the greater scale, our policies must be long sighted and sometimes difficult, even unpopular, while at the intimate level we all ought be compassionate and share in both success and grief. I believe we can neither escape the difficulties of life nor the constraints of space, but we can choose wisely for the people that will call us ancestors, while acknowledging the people who live today.<br />
<br />
I believe a plant in my room that I need to water occasionally might mean the difference between my life and death during prolonged periods of depression or isolation. I believe this offers me an instance to think of the power of plants and how they connect to me. I believe that without plants, my feelings would very quickly be moot. <br />
<br />
I believe in dancing; dancing for love and for frustration and for anger and for God and for sex and for boredom and for exercise, but not for protest or meaningful political discourse. I believe if you can move, or imagine moving and in your mind you can hear two sticks banging together, then you can dance for a myriad of reasons or none at all. I believe it is a mistake, like fashion or theatre or easy slogans to consider dance as a weapon of social change. Social change is not a byproduct of my entertainment, but dance might sustain me during ugly times as long as when I am not dancing I attend to matters.<br />
<br />
I believe in dogs. They have been our partners in survival for 40 000 years. I believe we need to listen to them even more than we need to love them.<br />
<br />
I believe wood grain, shell matrices and stone strata contain more beauty than architecture.<br />
<br />
I believe learning to grow food really enriches me, yet frightens me about how lazy and disconnected I am. I believe I might probably never grow food again alone, but it is within my small mind to imagine doing so within a connected group and perhaps that is worth noting for what it tells me.<br />
<br />
I believe that when I reach the point in life that I am upon meeting my vision of a maker, I will reflect on a great many things. Whole paradigms will shift. Regrets will be visceral. In this moment, if I get to really see my entire life before my eyes in candid detail, I might rethink a great many things. Every time I take a few minutes to try and imagine this scenario I will be gifted with the greatest wealth ever, and have the opportunity to rethink my next few actions.<br />
<br />
I believe the cult of actualization, esteem and personal satisfaction look really excellent on paper but paper burns away in an instant while service, sharing and bonding are instantaneously immortal.<br />
<br />
I believe that calling in sick on a rainy day and snugging into bed with comfort food and a well loved book is quite a bit more meaningful than most of what I usually fill my day with. This tells me that every day I need to think about how to shift the balance, not toward comfort, but toward meaning. I have just my sole voice to rail against my own complacence. It is worth listening to.<br />
<br />
I believe I neglect bounty and wisdom and I forsake truly wondrous opportunities because I allow myself to be consumed by places I wish I hadn’t been, places I think I ought be, and places I think I should one day arrive at. I redouble the ferocity of these crippling mental maps with fear and shame and only occasionally resist. I believe my best moments are when I let all that go and respond to the world spontaneously, even though whenever I do so, I feel a bowel loosening fear. In retrospect, risk has trumped fear every time, in value(for the record).<br />
<br />
I believe one day, before I die, the way I feel right now will be a distant memory that I reflect on with more experience. Will I smile at my journey, or will I have chosen paths that fuel regret?idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-44243081256042652632010-11-21T16:54:00.000-05:002010-11-21T16:54:18.181-05:00300 Years of Fossil Fuel Addiction in 5 MinutesHere's a short film narrated by <a href="http://richardheinberg.com/">Richard Heinberg</a>. It is the most efficient introduction to industrial/environmental/economic issues ever, but I am mostly posting it to see if i can figure out how to post a video<br />
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<object height="250" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cJ-J91SwP8w?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cJ-J91SwP8w?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="250"></embed></object><br />
<br />
The video is part of promotions for the <a href="http://www.postcarbon.org/">Post Carbon Institute's</a> brand new <a href="http://www.postcarbon.org/reader/">Post Carbon Reader</a>. Selections from the book are available<a href="http://www.postcarbon.org/reader/downloads"> here</a> if you are curious.idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-32092582656640045142010-11-20T16:59:00.001-05:002010-11-23T01:01:27.718-05:00Indigo Vertigo<div class="MsoNormal">I have a friend who sometimes unleashes eloquent yet antagonistic micro rants toward the Chapters-Indigo chain of bookstores. It’s been stuck in my craw of late, mainly because I recently read a bitchy scathing article viciously lambasting Chapters. Some of the sentiments reminded me of my friend’s ired laments, though the article had none of the pith and persuasiveness my friend comes up with. It got me thinking. More accurately, it got me defensive, as not only am I overly fond of my bloated book brothel, but i get defensive easily too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Obviously, the modern parable about the big corporate bully driving the little guy out of the sandbox has some merit. But I never feel that argument in Ottawa—Ottawa is so bleeding rich and full of colleges that there are still a bunch of little independents and used stores.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">But I still remember a long time ago, how very exciting it was to travel to Montreal and visit the 3 story tall Coles on St. Catherine Street. Soooo many books. Things I desperately hunted for among used shops, thinking of as rare books, sat humbly and affordably on their shelves, in print. Who knew this stuff was in print? Not me, there was no internet back in those days when you still had to be wary of raptors. Ottawa had its little shops and it's proto chains: Smiths, Prospero’s and mini Coles. They may already have amalgamated, I don’t remember. The "good" bookstores were fairly limited in shelf-feet and the chains were stocked with bestsellers, self-help books and those ubiquitous treekillers: the coffee table book (motorcycles, dead painters, technicolour recipes). What I did not have access to were big sections on philosophy, religion, science, geopolitics, sociology. I didn’t have an ocean of literature; I didn’t have access to any graphic novels.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(Creepy serendipity: I just turned on my radio and there is an interview with someone about book retailing, the rise of chapters and the fate of the independent. Update 15 minutes later, now Stuart Mclean is calling up book store owners to chat. Ahhhh, CBC. )</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One complaint I hear about Chapters is the floor space devoted to “not books”. They sell fancy candles, teas and soaps as well as other over-priced pretty things. I see these things --within the parameters of consumerism--as items people buy for nurturing and slowing down their worlds, and things they buy as precious gifts for people they care about. This strikes me as relatively benign.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Also in the category of “not books”, are untold diversities of notebooks (the premium priced Moleskin, so costly you fear writing something unworthy in it), scrapbooks, and day planners. Again, I see this as addressing and supporting a market for an active life as creator instead of simply encouraging passive consumption of culture. I also see this as providing people/customers with viable alternatives to complete cyber enmeshment > screw the word processor and outlook calendar, here is a paper calendar with photos of jazz artists, and a cozy diary with literary quotes that you can curl up in bed with.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Beyond that they sell a plethora of bizarre and unique board games. Again, I embrace this as a commodity designed with the function of getting people together in real live social activities. A real plus in a world dominated by "social media".</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal">Chapters also recognizes that a crucial component in a functioning civilization is regular easy access to quality amphetamines. To meet this requirement every chapters has a Starbucks—another corporation people take potshots at despite their fair trade price purchasing policy and their unionized employees. Politics of commerce aside, Starbucks brews serious joe.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I remember when Chapters first rolled into town, there was cry of doom. Service would be poor; the stores would be cold and anonymous. And once they had their stranglehold and had killed all the shops, all that delirious selection would vanish. None of that happened in Ottawa. They hire friendly talkative bookworms. They provide seating and you can sit there all day and read a book and no one will come bug you that "the books are for purchasing". Selection is still rich and while they did push a bunch of stores out of the market, many remained. They just aren’t a Walmart Death Machine.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Two disclaimers: 1. Idleprimate received no bananas from Chapters for writing this piece. 2. Idleprimate was not practicing assignment avoidance by writing this piece.</div>idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3413308198974932470.post-12167812605976825172010-11-14T14:49:00.013-05:002010-11-14T15:41:08.634-05:00I Am Ironing A Kitten: Play For That F*ckin' MoneyIt’s that most wonderful time of the year, the leaves are turned, the jack-o’-lanterns are rotting, Starbucks has redressed itself in festive Christmas red and school is arching into a murderous crescendo.<br />
<br />
While I am too educated to ascribe facetious causal explanations, I do find a correlation between my motivation to post to my blog and the intensity of assignment deadlines. I was faced this morning with the choice to either write something for this space or to catch up on email with an out of town dear friend—the reasoning being I had time for neither so had to choose just one. You get it, don’t you? In the time honoured spirit of self-plagiarism, I realized I could borrow portions from my message to generate a post, thereby maximizing the efficiency of my procrastination!<br />
<br />
One of my best methods of procrastination is imagining justifiable procrastinations. I briefly entertained a fantasy that friends would rent a car to go to the Montreal Small Press Fair this weekend and call me to come along and I would be forced to abandon my homework for the greater cause of vital socializing and cosmopolitanism. I stared hard at the phone and willed it to happen, the same way I have applied my will to Carleton University’s union to make their negotiations break down so they would make good their threat to strike. The spineless fuckers just keep sitting at the table while getting whittled at.<br />
<br />
I just can’t catch a break.<br />
<br />
Seriously though, I’m so frazzled. It’s reaching beyond peak frenzy. I have a paper due on Monday in my population class and it has my colon in a knot.<br />
<br />
Background: I got the best mark I have ever received, on the midterm in this class, and have week after week engaged the Prof in debate in class and on the class website. Last week, argument started to become a euphemism, during a vigourous discussion(euphemism) on China’s one child policy (I wasn’t defending it or condemning it; I was defending the notion of seeing it from China’s point of view—i.e. having 1.4 billion people and being a nation whose philosophy favours the collective over the individual). <br />
<br />
My Prof stormed up and down the aisle blaring about dead baby girls and an empiricist world that wants to solve its problems by telling Africans(?) they can’t have babies. He was mostly being bombastic and playing agent provocateur—and despite my promise to myself to not keep falling for it, I too was sputtering red faced. I was really out of control. My logic and focus was actually a cut above its normal level(at least in my vaseline-lensed perceptions anyway), but I was hollering and interrupting both the Prof and students. I revved up and started yelling directed questions at the class, nearly Socrates style, minus the stylish cool. Seriously all mental. A very uncivilized ape.<br />
<br />
At one point, I thought I had gained an ally, but it turned out that we had awakened a nazi-styled element in the class, who chimed in that international institutions should “get in there” to “stop them from having more babies” so china "wouldn’t wreck the planet”. So thereafter I had to fight my Prof on the one hand, who professes to believe that everyone should have lotza babies and that growth produced human ingenuity will save us, and on the other hand, fight the pseudo nazi sounding fellow behind me who felt some good old fashioned genocide was in order to make the world safe for North Americans. The only thing more antithetical to university dogma than neomalthusianism is colonialism, so I was saved from being the troll, but just barely. <br />
<br />
All that to say I feel like I have to produce a ringer of a term paper for this class. Due on Monday and I haven’t written a real word yet. I shouldn’t be writing this. It is stealing energy from my essay.<br />
<br />
And my head is broken. I started out with a theme examining the refugee wave of Somalis in Ottawa in 1993 following the Somalian civil war, and accumulated a wealth of data (it seems every Master’s thesis at Carleton from ’95-’97 was on this topic). I started to drown in data, and couldn’t find the right tone—I was thinking about the nightmare of being forced from a rural, subsistence, oral culture to an urban capitalist bureaucratic culture, and I was thinking of the naked piercing hate that was the response of Ottawa’s citizenry.<br />
<br />
From there I trekked over to a more general theme, examining the population composition of Ottawa. I collected a cornucopia of demographic data on Ottawa’s immigrants with the thesis that today’s Ottawa immigrants are more successful than immigrants anywhere, anywhen ever(in contrast to the media’s constant bleet that Multiculturism is failing). And then I started to flounder in lack of focus.<br />
<br />
In a completely random mind belch I moved on to global food production and arable land.<br />
<br />
From there I caffeinated my way to global population and the apocalyptic nature of growth. I couldn’t find any supportive data there. In scholarly circles there is a perceived crisis in the notion that the global population may start retracting sometime in the next century. Of course this is the same scholarly milieu that feels a reduction in global carbon emissions is also a crisis as it would impact food production (via the C02, not a reduction in petro farm inputs). I calm myself with the Jay Hanson quote that “magical thinking is still taught in universities”.<br />
<br />
I saw another scholarly article from an economics journal stating that human populations are proportional to information storage and that to be sustainable and accommodate growth, the world needs to focus on information technology. Aaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.<br />
<br />
At this point, I took a break and wandered aimlessly around the internet. I found this captioned photo that I pasted on the inside of my forehead as relief humour to remedy frustration:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjPFsaGrfpnuyaX2wzKRKuwX1nURm5I88bWKw2OQaeB2adLYTG0Iuue2Yoc3VCX8QPrFYZu3hGLs8TNE7YOi-MXmQZXOC0thxrFiXljtFzA7Y6KgjNTUlmcsUBXZNKWIXe2J9Ty7nCA4k/s1600/steve+martin+ironing+a+kitten.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjPFsaGrfpnuyaX2wzKRKuwX1nURm5I88bWKw2OQaeB2adLYTG0Iuue2Yoc3VCX8QPrFYZu3hGLs8TNE7YOi-MXmQZXOC0thxrFiXljtFzA7Y6KgjNTUlmcsUBXZNKWIXe2J9Ty7nCA4k/s320/steve+martin+ironing+a+kitten.png" width="220" /></a></div><br />
<br />
Fortified, I dove back into the fray. I started digging into China’s one child policy and the unintended consequences it is beginning to reap—an aging population and a more aggravated than usual imbalance in gender, both very serious issues that a society can wrangle with if it isn’t busy coping with mass famine and the kind of feral warfare that crashes that sort of party. I found lots of articles furiously furrowing brows at these coming Chinese crises, though little analysis of the benefits of a greatly reduced fertility rate.<br />
<br />
So, that’s where I am now. The paper is due at 6pm tomorrow and I have 18 papers on the topic that are ideal sources for a paper criticizing China’s efforts to stem population growth.<br />
<br />
And I still feel like an atomic ADHD sketchmonkey.<br />
<br />
And I don’t want to write this paper. I don’t want to write anything. I want to go to a cottage on a river and watch the leaves floating by. I want to bring a bunch of books and sprawl on a sofa in front of a pot-bellied stove warm with aromatic wood burning inside.<br />
<br />
I’m also halfway thru a paper on the Huron Indians of 17th century Ontario for my anthropology class. My thesis is on the historical evidence for settled agricultural egalitarian societies. I chose the anthropologist I am studying, the late Bruce Trigger from McGill University, based on the weediest intuition that his study demonstrated this idea. It turns out that he was a Marxist with global impact on archaeology and anthropology and was furiously concerned with applied anthropology influencing the “real world”. In popular scholasticism civilization is synonymous with hierarchy and class. Accordingly, settlement and agriculture lead inevitably such “progress”, the same way over-consumption, waste and throughput (instead of cycled) economies are part of progress. Trigger spent his career challenging not just this idea but how we formulate ideas(i.e. theoretical work). Incredibly fascinating stuff. I would like to spend a year studying his work and the work he was influenced by. This paper too is a towering overwhelming nightmare of too much curiosity and not enough precision. I don’t want to keep working on it either. The whole thing is moot: soon this paper will be handed in and I will, circuit training fashion, jog on to the next station. Sigh.<br />
<br />
I want to watch 70’s era Saturday morning cartoons and ponder the semiotics of my televised upbringing while slurping ice-cream. I want to spend the day rambling Conroy or Bruce Pitt Park and pet dogs. I pretty much would accept going to the dentist or boning up on tax law over my assignments.<br />
<br />
I lost 8 days of work(and much more in data) due to the fact that my computer melted down on Halloween. I attribute this entirely to the trickster gods who mind me. I attempted some magick that day, purposed to jar me from a rut. Coyote laughed his ass off and punctually stomped my computer into oblivion(seriously, within an hour of the ritual), which did indeed have the appropriate, if not desired, effect. Never let it be said that I am above tempting the gods.<br />
<br />
Through magicks I was able to replace my existential angst surrounding school with frantic panicked measures to actually get the work done. I also had to reach out, ironically enough, to my neglected personal networks in order to re-descend into the digitally connected world. The cherry on top was that I was unable to sit in the narcotic-like fog of the internet (which for me includes all my television and music habits) and instead read many books and worked on fall yard cleanup(screw you Green Man, I hate leaves!). <br />
<br />
For 8 days, I didn’t stay on top of weather updates, ugly world news, or hourly micro reports on the movie industry. For 8 days I didn’t trawl chapters.ca for books I can’t afford, didn’t troll comment areas in right wing publications and didn’t truant school for the almighty click. For 8 days, there were no LOL cats, spam or online gaming site pop-ups.<br />
<br />
With this sabbatical to the tangible world I felt wholly renewed and experienced a transcendent moment of an angelic Freddy Mercury singing about new times.<br />
<br />
The dangers of real world, real space, real time utopia were eventually overcome and I am comfortably sedated back in cyberspace.<br />
<br />
I am putting off finishing this post because then it means I have to go back to schoolwork and I just can’t bear it. I can’t find any way to rationalize not working on my essay, but I am trying really hard.<br />
<br />
There have been so many assignments that there is never a full day to sit back, breathe easy and say “I am on schedule and today is a day off”. Matters are aggravated by the idea that I will likely not be given the opportunity to use this degree in a professional capacity. More slowly and more troublingly, I am circling around the idea that I don’t think I want to use this degree in the given professions it is intended for. I can imagine being an environmental activist, or working on a farm in a small town, or even working in a bookstore and writing freelance. But I can’t imagine being a planner in a society that thinks of megacities as inevitable and insists on the nihilistic masturbation that is “sustainable growth”. I can’t imagine working for Stats Can when we can only compile reports that support dominant paradigms, or going on to graduate studies for the same reasons. I think working for Natural Resources would be equally maddening-we control 80% of earth’s mining and just quashed a bill that made gentle non-mandatory gestures toward international social and environmental accountability. Canada—a nation of malevolent dwarves.<br />
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I’m putting off ending this post because what I really need is to commune, to ‘hang out’, to span some time with people, with friends. The last thing I need is to continue pouring over articles with a highlighter, composing arguments that I don’t believe but that support the data. I noticed, researching, that when an indexed article doesn’t fit a given dominant paradigm it often hasn’t been uploaded to an online database. Makes you wonder what isn’t even indexed? Maybe I am paranoid, but its spookily common.<br />
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More and more often I find, if I use the language and frameworks that I am taught in school, and I use the data sources that are sanctioned, I am unable to say what I want and need to say. Often I can only say the polar opposite of what I mean. Eat your fucking heart out George Orwell. When I am trying to write my papers for the marks, and feeling acid burn in my tummy, I think of a line one of the characters in the TV show Treme was always saying: a horn player, scraping by from gig to gig, rarely playing what he wants to play; he always looks over slyly at a bandmate and says “play for that fuckin’ money”. He doesn’t say it bitterly or ironically, it’s just a bemused rally.<br />
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I seem to be running low on energy to play for that fuckin’ money. And I don’t get money, I pay for the privilege.idleprimatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10287702981119643646noreply@blogger.com0