Reality Leaks

“The oil will come ashore for weeks yet”. That is a quote from the Economist. 'Weeks' should be in italics. The Economist is a news weekly with a circulation of millions, most of the millions are middle class and up. What do weeks more oil spills entail? I don’t know they only advised me about my earnings if I push the euro against the dollar.

I had an even better quote, but The Economist seems to have taken it down off of their site. It was a technology quote. I paraphrase, quite easily inviting a libel suite, “ this shows our mastery over nature”. That quote had to do with creating artificial life. They didn’t say how it would profit me.

The Economist: if only it could be trusted to relate to reality in some way, is always informing me that as a western white person, I can shuffle my earnings around to avoid the pitfalls of varying headlines about regular people or the environment.

Unfortunately, I routinely scour small sources that have little to no effect over world affairs or bank accounts. Sometimes these sources are inflammatory, but sometimes they have deadly accurate reporting that I can’t read in my national newsies. Some of these sources are very well sourced, others not. So, I have to weigh what I read, the same way we do with our national newspapers(we do weigh what we read, don’t we?). Fine enough, I don’t expect the gospel source of information to be shovelled on high into my mouth.

In fact, I normally lean on the left side of expectorating issues, or at least am curious about the full impact of issues that are under reported or not reported at all in corporate owned newspapers. I expect huge coverage of a sports event to bury a banking scandal that effects millions. I expect some small detail of an ecological disaster to be reported in lieu of the real cause, real damage or the real culprits. The real culprits are often “everybody”, and who wants to read a story like that? I don’t want my reporting too accurate, that would be depressing.

Would you follow a magazine or newspaper that reported things like “Record Suicides in Chinese Factories Due To Your Shopping At Best Buy(yes the people building our toys are killing themselves because conditions are so bad). Or “Polar Bears Starving Because You Drove To The Supermarket”. Gah, I don’t want to read that. What about “Great swathes of the ocean and all its denizens dead after you plead for cheaper gas and home air conditioning” No way, I certainly don’t want to read that. What about “African Drought Will Kill More People Than The Entire North American Population Due To Your Obsession With Material Consumption”, holy fuck I really don’t want to hear that, especially after just enjoying, “the market is up in gold, diamonds, and fertilizers.”. Why should I give a shit about fucking brown people on another continent, I have enough of them here trying to sell meth to my children for gods sakes.

I could play this game all day and into the night. As long as the presses are still running, they will feed you. They will feed you whatever you need to hear to not worry that your way of life is ending, or that your way of life is not destroying peoples and cultures around the world.

Imagine that: you, not thinking hard, just doing your normal daily routines: brushing your teeth with 18 gallons of water, throwing out 3 kilos of packaging over a breakfast of 2500 calories(half more than most people get to eat all day, and just a tad less than the recommended amount for a whole day of survival). During your toast, and orange juice and bacon you glance through the paper and contemplate your allegiance to one party or the other, confident that either one will keep vitamins pouring into you from warm poor countries, and will keep fuel pouring in from very hot, super poor countries. There is very little time to read about how much high tech warfare keeps these backward sheep herding countries supplying the oil and fruit.

You scold your children for playing Wii over the table, and the eldest scolds you for driving a SUV, and you all live happily ever after in your theme-land life. Asians are dying trying to bring you the consoles for your games, and being killed to proffer you fertilizers for your orange juice and fuel for your vehicle. But who has time to think of the Chinese when you have to hire a new cleaner and you are worried about minor theft?

Your politics are offering you the chance to crunch down on factory vitamin enriched toast while tisk tisking right wing factions invading middle eastern countries, and you indulge yourself in a deep scowl over the mess in the Mexican gulf while never wondering if you will never again taste lobster in your favourite restaurant. You certainly don’t spoil your appetite wondering if there will be gas at the pump, or whether the grocery store will be abundantly overflowing with sales, as usual. It never occurs to you to wonder whether your children will inherit this bounty.

If you live an upright, moral life, don’t you have a right to drive your children to violin lessons and then stop at a fancy palace where they will give you a single use polyester bib so you don’t spoil yourself with food shipped in from half way around the globe?

On the way home, shouldn’t you be able to drive through a Timmy’s and drink a coffee brewed from starving people and then swoop in for a very cheap DVD of the newest sci-fi flic at a best-buy without wondering how much soil died to bring it to you? Shouldn’t you be able to watch it and feel camaraderie with the hero who fights for the rights of the people and their ecology.

For that matter, shouldn’t you be able to feel angry when you fumble to uncrease a morning newspaper that landed on your pesticided lawn instead of being inserted in your mailbox very carefully at no extra charge. Couldn’t the whole affair be more efficient because you are a busy person who has no time for the logistics of unfolding your 2 lb paper, only to find that after your efforts someone is trying to depress you with predictions of oil prices and single digit death news regarding North American soldiers in the middle east wars.

Can you imagine starting your day fresh and new only to learn that a single soldier was killed in your efforts to keep cheap fuel flowing at any cost of life to the “axis of evil”. You just took a shower and already fretted with a choice of hair conditioners, and then you step down to your breakfast only to be faced with depressing news. What fucking nerve.

My god, what kind of heathen would subject you to that? You are only at page four when you read about some new information that suggests climate change is progressing magnitudes faster than all the harsh warnings you were forced to read about over the last ten years. Its preposterous, they are only quoting four international peer reviewed institutions.

Fortunately though you remember a blog you read four months ago saying climate change is a financial boondoggle posed by bought scientists whose credentials wouldn’t hold up to your discerning gaze. You sigh relief at not having to consider the matter further. Can’t trust the papers anyway, right?

Luckily, your boss wants a better quarterly report on your pen cap sales, so you are only half reading. You are really thinking of how to lay off 4 towns worth of people who used to farm until they were subsidized out of the business of providing food, and pushed into manufacturing petroleum products. They never understood that they would get sidelined from that too. You don’t worry about who is responsible for the food now, nor how those towns people will fare since you learned that you wouldn’t have to cope with Mexican unions (what a headache) and the whole affair could move to a north-western province of China for a fraction of the cost and you would never again smell the casting machines molding pen lids. Not only that, but you won’t have to visit any plants, you could practically do your job from home with your shitty spreadsheet program. Now that’s an idea, a good income, a low interest mortgage, and a job that doesn’t require a tie. God bless America.

That makes it a really good day regardless of the price of gas.

You get really angry for 3 minutes about homeless people washing your windows then expecting money. Mostly you feel afraid for your life and therefore angry that your wealth might not protect you, but then you move on to the next hurdle and feel upset that someone standing dirtily on the street wants your toll booth stash, and that you will have to hit a drive thru a bank machine again before bringing your kids to Iron Man 2 this weekend.

Welcome to the present, please enjoy it while it lasts, I cannot predict the future except to say it will arrive whether you are paying attention or not. It certainly won’t be so funny.

Apocalypse Please, Hold the Propaganda.

Now, I like me some horror films. I like the silly creature features that prophesize giant insects to address human hubris. Sometimes they even scare me. I like the prurient slasher films, meeting our worst empty nest fears. I especially love supernatural and theological horror films, that fill you with true unease and dread about unseen forces that resonate within your cultural psyche, regardless of religious denomination. Give me catholic fear of The Exorcist and The Omen and I will quake.

Those films that tap into our deepest cultural and religious mythology really scare the hell out of me. And going deeper, they touch my perennial fears of the beyond. . . touch my ghost fears like Stir of Echoes or White Noise. They touch my existential dread of nightmares beyond our world. I eat them up as nice safe fears. Cathartic. Just as they were intended. Whether it is atomic ants in Them, or Norman Bates channeling his mother in Psycho, ghostly sailors in The Fog, a fear demon in the Boogey Man, or vengeful spirits in Mirrors, I like getting scared stupid, sitting in the dark in front of the magic shadows. And I usually thank the filmmakers afterwards for making me sweat.

Unfortunately, there are films that scare me far more. We have war movies that glorify the extension of empire, dramas that romanticize exploitive capitalism. Romantic comedies that project magic elixirs for relationships There really are no shortage of scary movies that aren’t the fun kind. The worst kind, are the ones that disguise themselves as nice genre escapes, the ones that pretend to alleviate our fears by indulging them.

Take the apocalypse film. It is usually so delectably fun. Mad Max, or Waterworld. Even A Boy And His Dog which had interesting gender commentary was still mostly an adolescent festival.

But I just watched one tonight, The Book of Eli. It turned my delicious dinner into a bad bout of sphincter clenching dashes to the bathroom.

These films look the same from the outside, but it’s what particular dreamy realities are being sold to us quietly that differentiates healthy pleasures from poisons. It’s all about the mythology. And it is all about the psychological hooks for the audience. Slasher films give us some sophomore morality plays about average behaviour—drugs, booze, sex—in the mythology its all capital punishment bad news, leading to an unstoppable killer coming to get you in unique cinematic ways. It reminds teens of the fears they have, as they begin the decision making part of their lives, and gives release to parental fears. Their crimes are not real, and neither are their punishments. It’s all about the fear.

And in so many theologic films, we’re given a blood freezing tale, that finally in the end gives us a rerun to order and justice in a world of powers beyond our reach. We are given to understand that there are force we cannot understand(whether political or supernatural), but we are also given to understand there are safeguards in place(in the case of theologic horror films they are usually hermetic priests and innocents, with the odd jaded sinner, and in reality, they are teams of scientists,journalists and activists).

All of these genre tropes were born in a wealthy culture riding the greatest tide of wealth and power that there ever was in history. The greatest wealth and power there ever will be. The greatest wealth and power that is now slipping away, inexorably, with nothing in human imagination to stop it or slow it down.

In the fifties, there was an atomic fear, which gave us all our glorious mutated bug movies. The thing is, it was an anxiety over a possibility, an outside chance that the technological optimism of the era might prove wrong, that the military guard dogs of empirical wealth might gamble poorly. It still may play out, but so far it has mostly been a fear. It is the parable of technology out of control.

The thing is now, people make glib comparisons of those anxieties to today’s, and there is an error. Atomic spiders were a symbol of unknown fears. Ghosts stealing children expressed anxiety of childhood disease—a possibility, but unlikely conclusion.

There is a huge difference between allegorical, or metaphorical expressions of emotional fear, and fantastic dreams about real issues.

A few years ago we were given The Day After Tomorrow, expressing our fears about global warming. But it projected a single defining event, and offered the panacea that an oppressed overpopulated country, weak on resources would welcome hundreds of millions of refugees and somehow be able to sustain them. Personally, I have an easier time believing in the giant Ants.

More recently we had 2012. A mystic prophecy foretells a random event, something in technobabble having to do with solar neutrinos, up there with Lucas’ midichlorians, that makes earth unfit for humans—but luckily “arcs” are built, saving the best and brightest, and the most tenacious. Well that's a yummy gene pool for a happy ending. All the worst of humanity weeded out, and a new earth for all our captains of industry and science, nicely wrapped up in a biblical bow. It’s not cathartic release. It’s opiates for real fears.

This is a trend. Most recently we are delivered The Book of Eli. The earth is devastated by who knows what. Nuclear war, shredded ozone, a blistered drought brought on by carbonized atmosphere. Who cares, the apocalypse has come and it is dusty and desperate, except that one man is on a mission carrying a bible. Yes, a bible, not a book of Eli, just a bible like you would find in any motel on the way to the apocalypse. God knows it didn’t help us over the last couple thousand years. It’s been prone to causing wars, secrecy, lynchings, witch hangings, empirical justification; damn, the whole thing is based on an extended torture followed by lynching for that matter. But somehow, instead of cathartic release from our fears, we are given saccharine succour that our tawdry religious remnants have it all in hand. It’s all part of the plan. That’s what is disgusting about these films. They don't make ridiculous, our fears. Nor do they validate them. The seek to neutralize them with pathetic justifications based on nihilism and fantasy.

The internet is full of journalists pleading for people to listen to the fact that some of our most powerful people believe the earth is worthless, and this life is transitory, and that all our warring efforts, poisons and industry are simply a step on the path to some heavenly purpose. And now, instead of even being given some catharsis for our fears, we are supposed to swallow some last ditch dust ridden god mission proving this so?

I had to stop the film, despite being a hardened fan of apocalypse films. I would rather have rooted for the sycophantic opportunistic mafia type leader of the burgeoning post-world communities who wants some consolidation of his leadership so things can be reorganized than a god driven shepherd bringing the holy bible wherever it needed to go.

I couldn’t finish watching the Hollywood maniac machinery deliver its tired version of a desired ending for apocalyptic christians. I didn’t give up too prematurely. But I realized we had Denzel as Adam, and his needy bride (from That Seventies Show), blazing the way, bleeding and stoic, to carry the word of god, and I just couldn’t take it. Or maybe they are both Moses. It doesn't matter. that frightening audience will take a mash up as long as they get the right signifiers. But, I just wasn't buying the ugliest ending of our world(too close to real possibility) being made relevant by the continuance of an ugly religion that paved the way for the destruction.

I had an easier time swallowing pagan gods assisting the salvation of Christian Word in The Secret of Kells. At least that was told in a beautiful myth that combined mythology and adventure with a digestible version of cultural succession in an ongoing world that we did not rule or pretend to rule.

A long fan of all forms of narrative, I am becoming wary of any use for it. I fear narrative no longer informs, but simply deludes. apocalypse with popcorn.

In Appreciation Of Appreciation

Have you ever met one of those control freaks that is too cool for school and doesn’t let himself get excited about things that other folk might? You know, one of those annoying people that meets a celebrity(and by celebrity, I mean whoever would be a celebrity to you; for me that might be an author, graphic artist, scientist or radical activist) at a public event and acts like he’s talking to a theatre usher because he can’t bear the vulnerability of excitement or (gasp) adulation. These guys stand at the back of a reading, aloof, and “don’t bother” the author with a request for an autograph. They resist, with affected noble aplomb, the urge to tell an artist “I love your work”, because that is what everyone else in the crowd is saying, and they themselves are dying to say it too.

OK, so that’s me. I am that big stick in the mud, trying desperately to ground free floating star-struck excitement. Everyone knows someone like me, it is the person who you are least apt to choose to tell the news that you got tickets to U2, because they just say, 'that's nice, I hear they play pretty good live'. Because they won't squeal loudly with you.

From time to time, I have scraped at breaching that code and usually managed not to learn anything from it.

When I was in my early twenties, I was scrounging through an enormous used book store located in a real live barn just outside of a little village on the St. Laurence. I was ecstatic to find an older out of print book by Al Purdy, an Ontarian poet who I was enthralled with. The proprietor noticed my trembly sweaty hands, eager with the treasure found. She told me, if I wanted more of his work, I should just write to him as he probably had lots of his own books lying around at home. She said it so matter-of-factly, like this elder statesman of Canadian Poetry was one of my neighbours or classmates, someone I might just approach. She even said, “it’s not like he’s a rockstar”. How could she not understand, that’s just what he was, he was my Bono. Only more than a rockstar, he was a mentor, an imam, a shaman. I didn’t know what to say, and chose the most mundane route. This was before the internet when you might easily look someone up so I told her I had no way of contacting him. She immediately wrote down his address, saying that he was a friend of hers and enjoyed getting letters from readers.

I returned home to Montreal with my star powered scrap of paper and typed out a letter. I did my best to disguise my appreciation of his work, or more accurately to hide the fact, that for me, this was equivalent to writing a letter to a movie star. Instead, I was somewhat inquisitive, and more than a little critical; to top it all off, I had the sheer youthful audacity to push some advice on him(about coping with being old, of all things). After I sent it, I cringed, ‘what have you done’.

Shortly thereafter, I received a reply, typed on the back of some hotel stationary. It was jovial and ripping, and tore mighty holes through my young bravado. And it included the delight(coming from him) of accusing me of sounding like an old man in my cups. His letter held the exact living and breathing words I might have imagined from this literary titan in my world. We exchanged a number of letters thereafter(read: inward backflips, outward nonchalance).

His replies were always on odd scraps of paper—diner placemats, torn faces of Christmas cards—he seemed to take a religious stance against clean paper. Sometimes they were handwritten and I will never know what these letters said as they were indecipherable. Every letter was encouraging and took seriously the things I had said in mine.

Eventually, he invited me to spend a weekend up at his farm where we could more properly face off on poetry, maybe over something pottable. It was the invite of one friend to another, only I was still that tightly wound fan-in-disguise. I was the little man behind the curtain who people were suddenly paying attention to. I made faux plans to go and then shyly faded out of communication. It is one of the great bleeding regrets in my life, and probably not unusual, as one of those experiences where in youth, we come up against the limits of our confidence.

I did have the opportunity years later to meet Mr. Purdy face-to-face. It was at a reading in Vancouver. As if in some kind of apologetic offering, I brought him a charcoal portrait I'd drawn of another of my hero-authors, a man recently passed away that Mr. Purdy had been a long close friend of. I felt ashamed of the assumed intimacy of it, and yet was compelled. You know what that lovely old bastard did? He made me autograph it to him in front of the crowd. So, I have ended up with great moments in my life and great regrets tied together with this irascible poet.

From this, I might have learned, if nothing else, a self-interested value in communicating praise with those one admires. Me? Nope, I have many great strengths, and one of them is to resist learning. I have since then had several experiences in a similar vein, where I balked when I felt to vulnerable to someone who had made an emotional or spiritual impact on my life, after engaging in communication with them.

One of the consequences of these anti-productive lessons, is I haven’t usually made the effort to communicate appreciation to those who influence my life from a distance. I’ve been trying to change that. And with almost two decades of the internet, it’s not usually hard to track someone down if they have any kind of public or promotional life.

Now, if the fan letter I wanted to write was addressed to Dan Brown or Johnny Depp, it would probably just end up in the slush pile of a publicist. But, as much as I love a Steven Spielberg movie, that’s not who I think of writing to. Instead it is often a musician who has a day job, a blogger who is trying to aggregate news items to make sense of the world, a professor slogging through mediocre student essays, an artist who is only on the regional circuit, or a writer, who despite being distributed on Amazon is simply another guy like you or me, toiling away alone in a room.

My experience has always been warm replies, and usually a dialogue can develop. If a person has managed to publish an article, or produce a CD, or get a book into print, I get this misimpression that the person has “made it” and has better things to do than hear someone say, “wow, I really liked this”. And it usually isn’t true. Not that a reply is the point here. The point is getting the message of appreciation through to someone who isn’t actually overwhelmed with appreciation.

More generally, there is little enough appreciation going around the universe, and that any time I can contact someone who has contributed meaning or pleasure to my life, that the least I can do is let them know. At best, sometimes, the benefits of interaction accrue: there are mutual blooms.

Anyway, in my ongoing bid to overcome my notable ability to resist learning, I am recommending to myself and to others, whenever the opportunity surfaces to offer appreciation where appreciation is due, offer it.

At the very least, I let someone know that their work has reached across the void and touched me. their work has breached seemingly impenetrable space and added to being. I may have never made it to the farm on Roblin Lake in Ameliasburg, but I can still learn from the letters of that old man.

Canuck Comics rule: Von Allan’s “The Road To God Knows. . .”

After the restorative magicks of a heatwave, the agitated ape is resurrected from winter hibernation. The gibbled gibbon, the crazed chimp, the silly simian, the mirthful monkey, the languid lemur, the grumpy gorilla, the almost humble hominid is sheepishly sidling back up to his blown-off blog. Please ignore the alliterative angwantibo.

Today I have an absolutely shameless and gushing plug for writer, artist and graphic novelist, Von Allan. Mr. Von Allan hails from the quaint and remote village of Ottawa Ontario. I mention this for two reasons. One, I live there, and two, I rarely have any bonobianly bountiful sentiments related to this blightful burg. Without further ado:

Aside from being a self-taught artist, Mr. Allan is a micro-publishing magnate, loosed unto the world with his debut graphic novel, “The Road To God Knows. . .”(available at Chapters, and Amazon, as well as Barnes and Noble—whatever that is).

It offers an understated but poignant tale of strained adolescence, depicting a young woman coping with the her mother’s schizophrenia. It’s as simple as that, nothing sensational, or self-helpy, no great revelations, just a series of painstaking and loving details of days in a girl’s life. The dialogue is character driven, lusciously breaking all kinds of narrative rules in order to draw you into the difficult moments of a person’s life, at an age when expression and disclosure are choked. And that is the beauty of the story—the empathic tension we feel watching from the camera eye, unable to reach out and help. You aren’t reading a graphic novel, you are viewing the highlights of a spy-cam; the frames and sequences seek to direct your psychological and heartfelt discovery of this tale.

I found Mr. Allan’s work on the internet before there was a paper edition, and it was the art that drew me in. Well, no, to be accurate, it was that damned perfect title that caught my attention. Breezing through some artwork hooked me. I mention this because I am not sure how to describe it. Everything that comes to mind sounds like backhanded compliment or criticism, and it isn’t. This black and white work is brilliant, emotive and evocative. And as someone who recognises the artist’s inspiration for settings and locales, the drawings are great on a purely technical level(I warmly recognise all manner of places).

It’s really worth a redundant gush, because I read an interview with the author in Ottawa’s newspaper, The Citizen, describing how Mr. Allan came to drawing later than most, and was constantly told to give it up, that “he sucked”. I can’t speak to his growth as an artist, just the power of his work in this story. The style is realistic, foregoing so many available graphic narrative techniques available for the medium, and so the challenge is, technical. For a self-taught artist, self-admittedly challenged, to choose direct representation, rather than cartooning, exaggeration, surrealism, etc. demonstrates a vision, discipline, dedication and vigour. I can see the occasional graphical flaws: flattened perspectives, unnatural feeling angles in bodies at times, and somehow magically they aren’t flaws.

I can’t say anything about intention. Some aspects of art are planned, some well up from the sub-conscious, and some are accidental bonuses. What I can say, is the level of detail, the grey-shading, the “cinematography” are all exquisite and create a beautiful sense of reality within the decadent pleasures of drawings. Allan’s choice of vista is profound and ambitious, with wide angles, camera depth, and no fear of full frames with entire figures and all the complications entailed in that. In fact Mr. Allan seems to revel in these full images. They are stark and vulnerable, like the tale they embody. I wish I had a verbal sensibility of graphics to describe it. His drawings scream to be witnessed, heard and understood, they command your attention, they implore your feeling.

The people and the story are potent, visceral, and drive home the fragility of our lives and the tenuous ways we reach out to each other, and I never would have read it without being seduced by the artwork. That really needs to be offered up to the critics of his art—I am as prose based as any person could be, a bodily divorced cerebral person, and it is the art that seduces me into the story, reaching into me and driving me to relate.

It’s a brave and personal story from the author, without being sentimental or maudlin. A mature work despite being a first work.

Anyways, check this one out. Buy it if you are a graphic novel fan, or go to his site for downloads or info.

We’re all on the road to god knows where.

p.s. despite the rock star kind of fame that we all know goes along with being a comic artist, Mr. Von Allan remains humble, not forgetting his roots, and will usually answer inquiries. at least he answered all of mine, and i was annoying.