The Strawman

The Decade as Farce and Tragedy

2009-12-30T21:27:00.015-05:00

For Music, the twenty-first century began in 1999. Jordan Knight, one of the spry, ingratiating kids from the by then odious New Kids on the Block, was attempting to revive his career, and in doing so, notes Tom Ewing of Pitchfork, “pointed most clearly at the future.” Ewing’s thesis is that “the worlds of pop, R&B and mainstream hip-hop were moving ever closer together, and a generation of stars, songwriters, and producers recognized an opportunity to reinvent how pop music sounded—and who listened to it.”

If pop was about to appropriate a new partner in crime and commerce, rock was about enter its lean years. In a final moment of desperation critics fell over themselves to anoint the New York City band The Strokes the new gods of Rock, but their ironically titled 2001 debut This is it? was only the start of a long argument.

A battle that pitted on the one side defenders of Rock n’ Roll, the Rockists, and on the other the children of 90’s popular music, the Popists, would change the terms of critical discourse. Soon, you could listen to pop music guilt free. Meanwhile, urban culture became mainstream culture, and white newscasters didn't blush when casually punctuating their telecasts with "bling" or "pimped-out!"

Then a plane flew into a building. The ensuing political vacuum led “the international community” to look to the West, where for much of the decade the only thing they could hear was a huge sucking sound. This lack of leadership infected global politics, a virus that most of the developed world contracted.

Parliamentary and legislative deadlock turned natural ruling parties into incoherent behemoths in Japan and Canada. While trying to join in economic and political union European countries were fighting false wars to reclaim national identities that had already shifted. The “Muslim Problem” was, and is, primarily about a sclerotic welfare state coming to grips with a rate of diminishing returns. Economies weren’t growing fast enough or equitably distributing their gains. People were growing older, and godless -- so Islam seemed very much that rough beast.

And then there were wars. A cosmic struggle over good and evil was irresistible to an unlikely alliance of idealist on both the left and the right, and religious warriors in Central Asia were all too pleased to fight it. Seen more rationally, internal disputes within the Middle East and Central Asia, framed as world-historical in nature, were merely political and geographic squabbles over power.

Further East, India grew, and even further East, China ballooned. Perhaps illusory, China’s economic growth may turn out to be more of a problem for China, and the East in general, than for the world. But China as an ideological competitor, an alternate reality for managerial statecraft, will be one more contingency that hunts Francis Fukuyama. History goes on.

The climate was changing, only a lot faster. Green became an ideology, an industry, an epithet. For the poor there was a lot of cheap, fatty food, and obesity. For the well-off there was moral superiority of eating better. Will and Grace was popular, and then gay marriage.

Men embraced extended adolescence, ultimate fighting, and poorer employment prospects; thankfully there were older women, "Cougars," ready to support their low ambitions and nurse their bruised egos. Because it was making less and less sense, there were a lot of commercials about what it meant to be a man. They didn't help.

People started watching themselves on television, and then started singing on television, and then started dancing on television. People also stopped watching television.They stopped reading newspapers and talking on landlines. What they started doing was, well, texting and blogging. They started looking at pornography on the Internet, perhaps one of the main reasons the Internet grew so quickly, and they started stealing. People stole music, and then they stole movies. It got so crazy that people even started stealing the Internet.

If 10,000 songs on your iPod seemed inconceivable in 2001, 100,000 applications on your iPhone, only nine years later, seemed excessive. There will be a whole generation of children who won’t know what a CD is. In the meantime, phones got smarter and people began to fear that Google was making us stupider. A whole industry sprung up around the idea that, somehow, culture was being “dumbed down,” becoming more “sensationalized." We ate it up.

If you were paying attention to the social scientists they assured us we were getting smarter. Yochai Benkler noticed that we were paying more attention to each other, had more opportunities to criticize and collaborate, were ultimately sharing more and expanding our cognitive capabilities through larger networks. And then we started talking about networks. The feedback loop was getting tighter, louder.

For the closet Marxist this was an opening. Neoliberal institutions began to falter. Corporate fraud was the "new black." An inflation of information wound up devaluing both the information itself and the public figures that produced it. Radical skepticism was the default position and social trust and cohesion began to erode.

There was a tsunami, some earthquakes, and a hurricane. Suddenly the world was a dystopian nightmare. The African continent, in a word, regressed. Former leaders of the independence movements neglected to appreciate Lord Acton maxim of absolute power corrupting absolutely. A counterweight to the world’s industrial powers, the BRIC, the g-77, started speaking with a unified voice after Doha.

A black man became leader of the free world, while the last icon of popular culture died. Our guide through the farce and tragedy of the last decade was a caustic Jewish man with a half hour show. From time to time he would disrupt the prevailing narrative, forcing media organizations to tacitly acknowledge their ridiculousness. One news organization wore its ridiculousness as a badge of honor and became the obnoxious mouthpiece of a misguided, though perhaps well intentioned, president. Because we were dispossessed, power so completely a function of larger interests, entertainment was news and news was entertainment. It wasn’t a stretch for TMZ to become a legitimate news organization.

Just as the beginning of the decade started with the dot.com crash, our collective entrepreneurial imagination far out pacing objective reality, the decade ends with a spectacular financial crash. Again our imagination, through mind-numbingly confused financial innovation, far outpaced material reality. Not only could you turn debt into a financial instrument, you could turn that financial instrument into thousands of other pieces of financial instruments. You could trade stocks that you didn’t own. In fact, you still can. Think about that for a moment.

So it was a little cute when former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan announced that he had identified “a flaw” in the system. Who knew self-interest wasn’t reason enough for financial firms to regulate themselves? Who Knew! You would only had to have been alive in 1998 to internalize that chestnut, which Mr. Greenspan, in fact, was.

How much risk were you willing to take on? If your model for tough-mindedness, discipline and hard work was Tiger Woods, who for many it was, then there was an unpleasant parallel that capped off the “Aughts.” Choose your colorful pun, but ultimately we all took excessive risks. In short, we were all too human.

So what points to the future today? One word: Women. A subtle and under-appreciated shift in gender dynamics pervaded much of the decade. You could see this in labor market trends and educational attainment. Women started winning all of the careerist foot races and decided to start their lives before the golden seal of marriage. Ms. Bradshaw was a lagging indicator of a lager trend.

The old school Feminist resented the new school, unwilling to accept that family and children or career was actually a false choice. It turns out that there was a heterogeneity of things that women could want, and do, and not feel lesser. What does this mean? First, forget the work week. Forget the office. Women began to prove that productivity and efficiency didn't only exist in company's org chart. And while the computer geeks laid the foundation for the next phase of global economics, it appears that women may be its key architects. World, hold on.

The New Geography

2009-12-14T00:08:00.049-05:00

One summer weekend in the not too distant past, my girlfriend at the time was traveling down from Ottawa to visit me in Waterloo, Ontario, where I was living. I was really excited to see her, though much less so to be meeting her parents for the first time.

They would be flying in from a small town in Northern Alberta, to meet in her Ottawa, before driving down to Waterloo. A last minute change of plans, though, would make me even more nervous. Now, only her father and her would be coming down to visit. After furiously cleaning my place that Friday evening in preparation for their arrival, I sat on my couch and stared at the ceiling.

The introduction, thankfully, turned out to be less painful than I was expecting. By the end of the evening the three of us were silently working away on a puzzle, a wise suggestion, I later found out, by my girlfriend’s mother. I would sleep on the couch and the next day we would all go to Marine Land.

Before I closed my eyes to go to sleep that evening, I thought it would be a good idea to look at a map, just to be clear on directions. The thought passed as quickly as it came, and, instead, I went to sleep.

The next morning we all loaded into the car and set off for Marine Land. My girlfriend gave me a big approving smile and a wink, signaling, I thought, that I was making a good impression.

An hour later we were going in the wrong direction.

Neither my girlfriend nor her father were familiar with Ontario highways, and it seemed obvious that I wasn’t either. Consulting and wrestling with my map from time to time, I could feel the weight of their gazes on me, the summer heat pinching at my skin. Marine Land may as well have been on the other side of the world.

A confluence of things has made what happened to me that summer day become less and less common. Not only has the ubiquity of geographic information systems like GPS increased our ability to locate and orient ourselves with much greater ease, there has been a broader shift in the way we interact with our public environments.

When Google Earth was first released in 2005, it gave users a new desktop tool for procrastination. The sheer novelty and wonder of being able span the globe with the click of a mouse was thrilling. In one smooth glide you could fly over the Serengeti desert and find yourself looking down on Tokyo’s densely layered wards. A virtual, worldwide jaunt from the comfort of your own home should not have immediately struck anyone as ground breaking, but with the introduction of fined grained data, and a lot of it, that would soon change.

A new wealth of information is reshaping nearly all of our daily activities. Observing and analyzing the way we use energy has helped us use energy more efficiently. By closely tracking infections and diseases we’ve been able to identify epidemiological patterns and as a result reduce the rates of contraction and infection. Indeed, the threat of H1N1 has remained just that, a threat, much like Avian Flu and West Nile virus.

This wealth of information has also led to a variety of new types of conceptual mapping, ones that are showing us different ways of looking at information within public environments. But, more importantly, the scale of both the information and new technology has become inverted in two significant ways.

First, the type of technology used to map and process this information has become smaller. Whereas in the past mapping applications were vast, unwieldy and proprietary, more likely used for large scale industrial and commercial enterprises, today relatively inexpensive and powerful computers, advanced telephony, digital compasses, and optical camera sensors have made these applications readily available for personal use. The second inversion involves the information itself.

The simplicity and functionality of new smartphone technology has paved the way for an explosion of social input. Not only are governmental and commercial entities adding to this growing wealth of data, more fundamentally, the gathering of information has been opened up to anyone with the interest and the initiative. In the process, the rough and tumble of daily life has become far more richer and granularly elaborate.

Perhaps the best example of this is the usefulness of an application like Google Maps, where users are able to input a desired location and receive the distance, time, as well as the best possible routes for future trips. That convenience, once only the preserve of desktop computers, has migrated onto smaller, handheld technologies. Even then, getting directions is one thing. People have begun to use their cell phones and smartphones to draw from the layers of relevant and oftentimes interesting information once they reach their destination, opening up an opportunity for a whole new immersive experience.

A number of new smartphone applications are utilizing a software platform called Augmented Reality to enrich the users experience with public environments. Augmented Reality is the idea that layers of useful information can be embedded in and added to the public spaces we encounter everyday. Imagine placing the camera of your phone down a busy street in a downtown core and being able to receive a visual output of all of the available information. There could be a sale down the street at a bookstore you’ve never heard of, or a talk by the chairman of Infotronic on the third floor of that building on your right. Imagine getting a notification that part of your 401k or retirement savings were tied up in Infotronic. Suddenly, the environment has much more salience to you than you had ever expected. Instead of seeking out this information, a much more labor-intensive task, it may already be hanging in clouds of data all around you, ready to be discovered.

Layar, touted as the world’s first Augmented Reality browser, is a new software application that attempts to integrate any available commercial or public information with geographic tags in your proximity. In effect, users are given an encyclopedic window onto the contours of their landscape through their mobile phones.

Currently, Layar is available through Android, Google’s mobile operating platform, and the iPhone. Although Apple’s mobile operating system boasts a wide variety of applications, Android’s open-source model has been much quicker at adapting the contributions of developers and users into expanding the functionality of various mobile applications like AR. Juniper Research recently reported that by 2014 services supported by AR could total as much as $732 million in revenue, establishing much of their infrastructure from overlapping databases of crowd-sourced and geo-tagged information.

A recent New York Times article described the growing trend of harnessing crowd-sourced information in developing mapping applications. One non-profit, OpenStreetMap, organizes groups of volunteers in different cities throughout the world to help collect geographic data, slowly filling up informational gaps where they may exist. Much like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap’s goal is to make maps freer and more accessible to the general public, without the restrictive licenses that many commercial firms apply to their own proprietary maps.

Always at the vanguard of tapping into the potential for social production, Google developed Map Maker in 2008 as a collaborative tool that allows users to construct their own regional maps. By layering this crowd-sourced information onto their existing databases, Google is scaling large amounts of information in a largely decentralized though shrewdly managed process.

Even as some express concerns about the reliability and quality of user generated maps, technology writer and blogger Tim Lee suggests that, “like any disruptive technology, the initial use of these maps probably won't be ones that directly compete with incumbents.” Mr. Lee’s writing has largely been concerned with the inflexibility of large, hierarchical organizations and their management styles. He regards Silicon Valley as a signal example for the way in which information should move within institutions, where ideas and information are openly shared and collaborative production is valued as a practice and not merely as a slogan.

Mr. Lee went on to add, “to be successful, these mapping products will need to find niches that the incumbents aren't serving.” For organizations with flexible management styles, there is an opportunity for the types of bottom-up innovation that large commercial firms are too slow-footed to capitalize on, since in many cases crowed-sourced maps are much quicker at giving real time information.

OpenStreetMap 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Still, the notion that only commercially useful information enriches social life is a thin conception of citizenship. Another emerging feature a number of these new mapping applications is facilitating is a renewed sense of civic spiritedness. With the ability to access a wide variety of public information, calls for transparency and accountability are starting to ring more clearly, which in turn is altering the dynamic between public representatives and the citizens they serve.

Recently, Sunlight Labs, a Washington based non-profit aiming to digitize government data, developed an augmented reality enabled software application that gives interested citizens and public advocacy groups access to the location of government infrastructure disbursements. The application is currently being used to track the progress of the $787 billion dollar stimulus bill in the US.

Earlier this month Sunlight Labs saw a few of its recommendations included into the White House’s Open Government Directive, an administration initiative that will require executive departments and agencies to adhere to new principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration. Departments and agencies will now have to make a wide variety of their documents publicly available online and easy to search through. This may be one way, perhaps, of reducing the difficulty of navigating through complex public information, one of the major causes of public apathy.

Yet even when more transparency forces public officials to fully account for their activities, there will inevitably be areas of civic concern that large bureaucracies won’t be able to efficiently manage. And where public or private institutions are either unable or unwilling to effectively intervene, the pervasiveness of group forming technologies and applications are allowing citizens to intervene on their own behalf.

Clay Shirky, new media thinker and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has described how the access to inexpensive technology has had a fundamental effect on social behavior. Shriky sees sharing and collaboration as key ingredients in resolving the perennially difficult problem of broad based collective action, particularly when it arises outside of traditional institutions and organizational structures. In talks, Shirky has given crime wikis as an example of how group-forming civic initiatives can, if only provisionally, deal with collective action problems.

When Brazilian police were unwilling to publish complete geographic crime data in some high-crime areas, leading to the under-reporting of crimes by victims, Professor Vasco Furtado of the University of Fortaleza created WikiCrimes, a geographic database where victims can anonymously post the location and description of a crime they suffered. One of the challenges WikiCrimes faces, however, is the credibility of user reports.

In email, Professor Furtado said Wikicrimes tries to ensure the reliability of its information by analyzing the reputation of its user through their interactions with other users. Even though a number of press organizations and governmental agencies have been recognized as respected certifiers, Furtado acknowledges that “the attribution of reputation to the users who are not qualified as certifier entities is fundamental.” He believes that this makes the system as a whole more reliable.

Today, WikiCrimes has over 6,000 users, %20 percent of which have registered crimes. Its existence, Furtado noted, has forced some state governors to start publishing crime data online. And while law enforcement is still reluctant to work with WikiCrimes, Furtado says that the public debate over the application’s usefulness is a big cultural change. He hopes that in the future law enforcement will be able to see Wikicrimes as a complimentary tool in helping to fight crime.

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that “knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.” In a culture where the integration of diverse types of information is leading to innovate software platforms and inventive social and commercial applications, the ability to combine existing forms of public knowledge is a crucial component for social and material prosperity.

The wisdom of crowds and the robustness of new collaborative social networks have allowed citizens to engage in broader civic and commercial initiatives, helping to stitch together the patchwork of rich and complex databases all around the world. What used to be asymmetries of information, where the general public had very little access to sources of public knowledge, have now become wider distributions of collective intelligence. Many hands have no doubt made the work lighter.

Many of these positives aspects, though, have unintended consequences. One pernicious effect is the yawning privacy and security gaps that now push the onus of protection onto each user. People are being forced to be more cautious with the types of information they volunteer and savvier in the ways they manage their online personas. Another troubling effect is the ability of large organizations to monetize the free work of eager contributors, a notion some are beginning to refer to as the "Hobby Economy."

The challenge for the citizens, policy-makers and private and public institutions will be to adapt their rules and laws to address these issues. But the broader implications are promising: technologies and applications that have ability to scale the complexity of an astonishing amount of social data, and the potential for users to optimize on-the-spot decision-making and learning.

In essence, geographic data is more than just about a particular place, it is about the character and richness of the narrative that individuals invest in that place. Clusters of local knowledge are now being augmented by the idiosyncrasies of groups of citizens, adding new layers of context, from video, text, audio, and images, on top of old ones. Perhaps we’ve entered an age where search as a platform has lead to discovery as a window, and that by looking we can know not only where we are, but also what we want to do next.

For the next hour we drove around aimlessly. I could sense that my girlfriend was burning with embarrassment and anger. Very little was said. When we finally decided to drive back to my place, I was expecting the inevitable questions. Didn’t you have any idea where Marine Land was? Do you know how to read a map? At the time, my competence was definitely open to scrutiny. But somehow, none of these questions arose.

That afternoon we ate lunch in silence. My girlfriend’s father finally broke the tension by saying he thought Marine Land was ridiculous, and that it was better that we never made it there at all. I appreciated the gesture. That evening we worked on another puzzle together and joked about how silly the day had been, how tense and irritable we all were.

That night before I went sleep I looked over the map. I closed my eyes and tried to think of were we could have gone wrong. I put the map down and looked up at the celling. It occurred to me, finally, that we could have just asked someone for directions. That would have been much easier.

The Fix

2009-11-09T19:02:00.011-05:00

Embedded in last night’s season finale of Mad Man are two parallel solutions, one commercial, and the other artistic.

Much has been made about the price tag of each meticulously crafted episode. At over $2 million a show Mad Men cost a staggering amount to produce, and naturally, the money men at AMC have let slip that a fourth season may be too expensive for the network to green-light. Matt Weiner, the show’s creator, hinted as much in the press pool backstage at this year's Emmys shortly after accepting the award for best drama. So the question is, will Mad Men survive?

The answer might be yes. It turns out that the staff at Sterling Cooper, the ad agency the show revolves around, is getting smaller. Last night, through a series of cloak and dagger machinations, Roger Sterling, Don Draper and Bert Cooper jumped ship to start their own agency. The twists were comic and quick moving. Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell, initially skeptical, were briskly wooed along, shortly followed by Harry Crane and Joan Harris. Setting up shop in a hotel, the newer, leaner agency provides the commercial solution that might save Mad Men.

Against the backdrop of this corporate tumult, Matt Weiner was somehow able to exceed a few expectations. Last week’s blockbuster episode was perhaps the saddest Mad Men ever. Not only was it the assassination of JFK, the Draper marriage also suffered a mortal blow. The obvious metaphor of the end of Camelot is invoked when we learn in the same episode that Betty no longer loves Don. After an episode so bleak, a let down was in order.

Last night’s episode, however, looked forward. Things were laid bear, and the bitterness and distancing between Don and Betty was given a more immediate and physical aspect. But the feeling was on of motion. While much of this season has been a slow walk through mannered domesticity and small, interior lapses, the season finale was a fast jog toward a transition, evoking the melancholy of an ending and the nervous rush of a new beginning. This is the artistic solution that gives season four of Mad Men newer possibilities. It is certainly an achievement to get two parallel lines to meet, and Matt Weiner may have done that last night.

At the end of the episode we see Don Draper pulling his suitcases out of the trunk of a cab and making his way into what is likely his new home. The music that plays as the camera pulls away and the screen fades to black captures that thrilling uncertainty and wonder of a new start.

In Other Magazines

2009-08-25T17:15:00.006-04:00

Slate has broken my heart. They’ve decided to discontinue the “In Other Magazines” column.When the week came to a close “In Other Magazines” cobbled together a list of the most interesting feature stories “in other magazines”, directing readers to must-reads and steering them clear of must-misses. Insofar as it was a taste-making and agenda-setting enterprise, it was a valuable service.

Over the weekend I would settle on two or three long-form articles to get a broader perspective on a particular social debate. Perhaps the most illuminate piece of writing I came across this summer was Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article on the regional cost disparities of medical procedures in the state of Texas.

Comparing two demographically similar towns only 800-miles apart, Gawande found that the pre-capita cost of Medicare for McAllen, at roughly $15,000, was close to double that of El Paso, at $7,504. The conclusion Gawande draws is that culture matters. Medical professionals in McAllen had gotten into the habit of looking at the health care system as service industry, collecting fees for more and more procedures. Patient care was an afterthought.

For a time during the summer Gawande’s piece became the go to primer on the dysfunction of the United States health care system. Even president Obama, just as the house and senate were preparing to draft various pieces of health care legislation, implored members of congress to read the article. It’s likely that didn’t. But if they wanted to they could have happened upon it “In Other Magazines”. Alas.

But in its demise Slate has inaugurated “The Slatest”, the news aggregator to rival all other news aggregators. Collecting the top stories from the top newspapers, The Slatest will at the very least offer breadth. Most interestingly, though, is what Slate editor David Plotz has to say about the “New Cycle” as it exists today:

Overnight, newspapers launch the news. They publish stories clarifying the events of yesterday; they break their own investigative stories; they print zeitgeist-defining feature articles and op-eds. The morning brings Phase 2, when Web media reacts to the news. Bloggers and other sites respond to the news that broke overnight, and newsmakers push back against or try to exploit these stories. Phase 3, the buildup, comes in the afternoon, as the events of the day unfold—congressional action, a presidential gaffe, turmoil in Asia. The media break this news, and analyze how it fits together with yesterday's top stories. Opinion makers try to shape how the day's events will play on the night's cable shows and in tomorrow's newspapers. The next morning, it all starts over again.

This is crucial. The Slatest will attempt to capture this process and document what the “New Cycle” has become, a struggle by public interest groups to frame the social, political, and economic narratives of the day -- journalist and media organizations, in turn, synthesizing and refereeing these struggles. I hope amongst all of the news and events Slate doesn’t forget what’s going on in other magazines. They have important things to say too.

Notes on "Free Markets"

2009-08-19T21:33:00.005-04:00

I

The “Free Market” isn’t really real. It never was. Even venerable classically liberal economists like David Ricardo and Adam Smith understood this proposition. Markets exist as arenas of exchange that facilitate the trade of goods and services between financiers, producers and consumers. Each one of these agents is a real live human being, or a legal fiction like the corporation, embedded into a number of different social institutions which, if we pay any attention to simple social organization, are compelled to act with a minimum level of cooperation and follow a rudimentary set of norms and rules that both condition behavior and require specific levels of good faith performance. The Laws of court are perhaps the best institutional example.

The state guarantees the enforcement of contracts and the protection of property rights. The fancifully abstracted notion that governments get in the way of contract or property disputes is to a certain extent misguided, often overlooking the alternative scenario of low-level social disruption or outright public disorder. Markets require the trust of civic legal institutions, tacitly abide by their rules, and prosper to the extent that they are seen as socially legitimate. Which, with respect to certain activities on the margins, for example the sale of marijuana, is always an ongoing and perennially contested soci-political debate. If you live in the real world, social institutions that regulate market activities are an inescapable reality.

It is also widely recognized that while markets operate within the context of these social institutions they are also continually shaping their development. When we look at the growth of the post-war automobile industry we see that urban and suburban planning mirrored the growing need for automobile use, and that the proliferation of single-family homes created a new market for a variety of different household consumer goods, from refrigerators to televisions to bed frames to coffee makers to lamps. The “Free Market” was responding to trends in social development insofar it was also determining them, and with the advent of the age of advertising the market began to shrewdly cater to an effervescence of a particularly new form of mass, modern culture.

But inside the complicated machine of modern society, specialized commercial industries, particularly in aerospace, medical and pharmaceutical sciences and agriculture, among others, worked within the ambit of government regulatory agencies, agencies that set the guidelines of market interaction and exchange. Quite naturally, though, these industries have begun to capture these regulatory agencies given their own propriety and specialized expertise. Oversight became a form of volunteerism where professional and regulatory bodies crafted, most often self-interestedly, the rules of the game.

Many of today’s market inefficiencies exist because markets aren’t free. Large regulatory agencies like the Canadian Medical Association in Canada are in positions of informational asymmetry, to which civil bureaucracies over-rely on their expertise and positional status, and come to accept their recommendations as sacrosanct. An alternative form of health service like naturopathy has been slowly but steadily expanding into the health care market as it has continued to gained social respectability. This, no doubt, has taken a considerable amount of social and political advocacy, along with a substantial amount of capital. “Free Markets” have all types of access costs, and we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought otherwise.

II

Fredrich Hayek’s insight that collectively planned economies lack the informational capacities to anticipate the prices and consumer trends in an incredibly unwieldy patchwork of decentralized markets is likely the strongest argument against most forms of command socialism. Distributing and allocating resources is something market capitalism has shown tremendous prowess in undertaking. But we’re not shadowboxing with the ghost of Lenin. If you live in a western industrialized country, you live with a system of rules that act as a bulwark toward your personal wellbeing.

Hayek understood the necessity of the rule of law, and sets of social and civic institutions that established the normative precepts for social behavior and trust. At a very crude level the state is a collection of the civil institutions, families, religious, scientific, cultural associations, markets, and municipal bodies that normalize and sanction contemporary conduct. These are all manifestation of “A Culture” and express themselves in all our social and linguistic interactions and exchanges. Markets do not exist in a vacuum outside of them.

III

If we accept that the market is a carefully staged competition that operates under the rules that its participants, to varying degrees, attempt to follow, then it’s easy to see why some misunderstand its essential nature. For some on the Left, competition is the inherent problem. Even while some aspire to equalize opportunity, the objective goal is to equalize outcomes. This would be incredibly self-defeating, given the diversity of not only human capacities but also the diversity in human aspirations. There isn’t only one market, there are many; and there isn’t only one status game, there are an innumerable amount of them.

For some on the Right, however, there is an almost ahistorical myopia of the reality of first-order injustices, those that have persisted over generations. The “Free Market” favors the most socially and physically capable, the thinking goes. Because racism and sexism don’t exist today, their long shadows aren’t being cast onto contemporary debates about race and gender. Equality of opportunity, it follows, equals not only equality of access -- and some might even suggest over-access – it should mean equality of outcomes. And since empirically this isn’t always the case, a far more pernicious claim against genetic inability is tacitly entertained. It’s as though the average male height of 5’6 in 1900 had increased to 5’10 in 2003 in a social, historical vacuum.

IV

Ultimately, the competitions that the market stages are neither free nor entirely efficient. They pit together the monopolies, statutorily regulated agencies, the public and private interest groups, me and you. They represent the largest competition of all: that contest to democratically seize the state through argument, debate, enticement, persuasion, and now more unsavorily, astounding sums of capital. They represents, quiet simply, the essence of politics.

The Problem with Complexity

2009-06-02T01:51:00.006-04:00

Thomas Homer-Dixon's 2006 book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization was a sobering diagnosis of the incredible challenges that modern societies face. His general thesis was that complex societies ultimately have trouble dealing with ever greater degrees of complexity, and that these stresses tend to increase social, political, and economic disruption. Homer-Dixon identifies four different stresses:

population, both in growth rates among the rich and the poor and the incredible growth of megacities in poor countries
energy, especially the growing scarcity of conventional oil
environmental, particularly climate change and global warming
economic, disparities in income between developed and developing countries as well as income inequality within countries

Indeed none of these stresses are mutually exclusive, which is the major concern among a great many politicians, policymakers and citizens. But perhaps the most important part of the equation is energy. To lay out his argument Homer-Dixon uses a powerful historical example. The Roman Empire required an incredible amount of "high-quality" energy inputs, primarily in the form of grain, as the basis for its administrative and industrial integrity. As the amount of complexity to organize their social, political and economic systems rose, so to did the "high-quality energy" inputs needed to run these systems. Once the quality of energy inputs decreased, the complexity of Roman institutional systems began an irreversible decline.

What interests me most about Homer-Dixon's thesis is his notion of complexity. When confronted with with multiple crises, as we presently face today, societies have generally tended to create newer layers of complexity. In the political and policy responses to the Great Depression, the New Deal essentially offered a series of technical remedies to deal with the complexities of a phenomenally powerful yet socially pernicious market-capitalism. The Civil Rights Act is another example, although it was obviously responding to other types of societal and political stresses. Still, new levels of bureaucracy seem to be the most natural response to existential crises, and legislatively enacted distributions, whether they be physical goods or procedural recognitions of status claims, become the ultimate remedy.

An incredible market failure has socialized risk, leaving governments around the world the thankless task of reorganizing a whole array of institutions. How they manage this reorganization is an issue riddled with political, social, economic and philosophical dimensions. Dimensions on top of dimensions; dimensions embedded in dimensions. If complexity is the problem, how is it possible to deal with our present challenges? I hope to explore this question further.

No Hope

2008-08-12T00:16:00.010-04:00

IT’S DIFFICULT to quantify exactly how devastating a loss for the Democrats in the November presidential elections would be for me. As a Canadian ex-pat living and working in Japan I’m clearly not in a position to be directly impacted by their electoral misfortunes. As a “Citizen of the world”, the consequences are somewhat obvious; a continuing decline in American prestige and influence; the rise of China and Russia as contenders to world hegemony. But for my physical health, a loss for the Democrats in November won’t be good.

On the night of the 2004 presidential election, I arrived home from work eager to follow the results as they came in. I knew from the experience of the “2000 debacle” that it could end up being a long night. But as I sat down to follow the news a feeling that had been foreshadowing itself all day began to overwhelm me.

A pall of cloudiness moved into my head like a cold front. I could feel building waves of nausea rocking in my stomach, a physical weaknesses entering my joints. It was all I could do to get to bed. I remember not being able to think straight, but wanting to; wanting to for the sake of the election. I remember not caring that John Kerry wasn’t even remotely presidential, as I had all through the primaries and during the presidential debates. Oh well. I closed my eyes and saw Bush’s face, a sly smile, then lost consciousness.

I’ve attempted to reconstruct exactly what happened that night to friends and family, yet somehow it always ends up sounding fanciful. That I could fall into a delirious fever dream the night of the 2004 elections, a dream in which I entered the future lives of my friends, coasting from one continent to another, seemed a little absurd. But that’s exactly what happened.

IN A VIVID SCENE I was following a close friend down a pristine sidewalk, a lovely girl on his arm. It occurred to me that this was his wife, and that he looked a little less younger and more filled out. I recall troubling over a cognitive dilemma: I felt neither fully asleep nor fully awake. Perhaps this is what purgatory felt like. As if in a waking dream, I started reaching out and calling for his attention. This didn’t seem to be working and suddenly I was mesmerized by a row of potted plants in front of a café with a black tarp awning. The next moment I fell through the sidewalk into empty, black space, unintelligible physical forces working against my body. I stood somewhere else now.

Another friend of mine was behind a large office desk and behind him a beautiful city skyline twinkled at dusk. His eyes were red from what appeared to be over work. I recall standing in front of him thinking he was surprised to see me there. A brusque, powerful woman walked into the room and began speaking but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. It sounded like English, only harsher and more aggressive. German maybe. She didn’t seem upset; she seemed controlled and strangely fluid. And it struck me as odd that she had no idea I was in the room, standing right beside her. I could see the skyline starting to disappear. Empty black space filled the room, and gradually the only thing I could feel were beads of sweat sliding down my face. I felt ill from the motion. And for the rest of the night I felt like I had traveled many places, always with the feeling that it was a possible future.

When I woke up in the morning I was too sick to go to work, so I went back to sleep. The next time I woke up I realized that something may be hanging in the balance, so I turned on my computer and checked the news and George W. Bush had won. I went back to bed again, though this time it felt like I didn’t wake up, and I was sick for a week.

Looking Backward and contextualizing that sickness always felt opportunistic and convenient in light of the last four years of what most would rightly characterizes as a global sickness. You cannot be hyperbolic in saying that the United States has been driven into the ground by an incredible failure of leadership. And not only that: Conservatism as a governing ideology has exhausted, at least for now, its usefulness. A political philosophy that is hostile to government in almost every respect will destroy government, from without and within.

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM TELLS US that America is essentially a force for good in the world, that a unique social and political experiment created a prosperous and democratic republic. The recent historical evidence doesn’t bear this claim out, and America’s legacy of slavery shatters this claim to pieces entirely. But perfection isn’t in the standing still, it is in the striving forward. Successive generations of social and political movements have pushed America closer to its ideals, that every man is created equally and endowed by their creator to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. The problem with American exceptionalism, though, and all credos of Nationalism is their insularity. In difficult times they will always drawn inward and justify their relevance.

International opprobrium and criticism leveled against the United States in the last four years has grown so loud and persistent as to be meaningless. Yet the more grounded criticisms stick: that America has turned away from multilateralism and bullied allies into submission; that they prop up an autocrat in one instance and topple him in another; that they double deal and operate on the fringes of internationally recognized law; that they are, even worse, arrogant. This is not a new development in American statecraft. It has always been a feature in the landscape. What has made it appear more acute in recent times is the outright bellicosity of the Bush administration, provoked rightly or wrongly by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It is probably fitting that George W. Bush will be remembered as both the apex and the nadir of American exceptionalism.

THERE IS ONE SCHOOL of thought in American foreign policy that believes in national greatness and an unending battle against evil around the world. The soft power of diplomacy and the strategy of containment won’t satiate this belief. Militarism and the continual threat of hard power animate this worldview. In a 1997 article for Reason Magazine looking at the disconsolate Conservative movement, Virginia Postrel and James K. Glassman mocked Conservatives complaints about the current state of the country. The economy was booming, consumer confidence was high, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and even despite their vehement disdain for Bill Clinton, Conservatives had already secured a number of legislative concessions from him, most notably welfare reform. Thus with the Cold War over, some Conservatives felt idle and restless. They wanted to “offer their own governing doctrine, “the appeal to American greatness” – a kind of wistful nationalism in search of a big project”, Postrel and Glassman wrote. Tellingly, Postrel and Glassman mused that this big project might entail “looking for the next war “or “hope for another great Depression”, fanciful ambitions at the time, but in hindsight ambitions with dangerous implications once Republicans would come to hold the presidency.

And now this school of thought pursues national greatness in Iraq, and its hawkish-ness colors particular foreign policy positions. They will not negotiate with Iran (but are beginning to), they will not negotiate with North Korea (and yet they have), and they would clamor for aggressive action against China and Russia (but are in no position to). There is absolutely no sense of priorities, or grand strategy. This is the height of magical thinking. Neoconservatives, along with compliant Republicans and Democrats who pushed America into Iraq, represent this worldview. John McCain, the republican presidential nominee, represents this worldview. For him, there is nothing presently wrong with American exceptionalism. The American electorate, more broadly, has affirmed this worldview for the last 40 years.

There is another school of thought in American foreign policy. It is more pragmatic and realist. It believes that the soft power of persuasion through economic and political concession will encourage countries to work to their own self-interest. It believes that international order and incremental progress will move the world to greater prosperity for all. Its flaw is that it doesn’t deal with belligerents as thoroughly as the Neoconservative worldview would have it, and thus condones territorial unrest. But there are too many fires in the world to put out. This worldview, judicious and respectful of American exceptionalism’s salutary influence, believes that multilateral institutions should act as a reasonable, though not ultimate, check on a country’s international activities, and that the military option is the final option, not the starting premise. People who adhere to this school of thought understand that America has to begin regaining the international capital it so poorly squandered in the last eight years. It must prove once again that it is humble and deserving of the world’s respect; that it is prepared to lead by example. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama represents this worldview.

IT IS SOMETHING OF a cosmic irony that the opportunity to change course is such a risky one for Americans. With nearly 80% of Americans believing the country is going in the wrong direction and polls showing Democrats overwhelmingly ahead of Republicans on most issues, John McCain and Barak Obama are essentially in a dead heat. Even one in four registered Democrats consider Obama a riskier choice compared to McCain, while 14% of Americans, evidence to the contrary, believe he’s a practicing Muslim.

In an interesting bit of reportage for Newsweek, Christopher Dickey journeys through Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas, where the deepest wounds of the Civil war still exist, tracing his ancestral linage. Reporting on Southern prejudices, Dickey finds just how strong the “Secret Muslim” suspicion is toward Obama:

Yet even a third cousin of mine in the mountains of North Carolina, an independent-minded Democrat who voted for Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004, said he can't bring himself to vote for Obama, either. Why? "Because I believe he is a Muslim," said my cousin. Not so, I said. He was raised a Christian and is a practicing Christian. My cousin shook his head. "I just don't believe him," he said.

But here is the irony on its face: He’s Black. His first name rhymes with Iraq. His middle name is Hussein. By changing one letter in his last name you can spell Osama. That is cosmic irony. Obama’s candidacy re-imagines the last eight years as a big, practical joke, and faced with the decision to change course, Americans are being tempted to give in to all of their petty and narrow prejudices. Actual political and policy differences aside, Obama should be up in the polls by at least 15%. Any generic Democrat, say, a John Edwards, would be already drafting his or her inaugural speech. But John Edwards is no longer a generic Democrat, and if the recent revelations of his extramarital affair are any indication, Democrats should be relieved that he isn’t their nominee.

Yet the knock against Barack Hussein Obama is that he looks too presidential; that he only gives great speeches and nothing else; that he draws incredible crowds as a result of his novelty, charisma and charm; that he generates hope and enthusiasm in those without it and fear and anxiety to those who need it. People also say he’s too skinny. Rationally, none of this makes any sense. But to the extent that non-whiteness, or non-maleness, represents an electoral anomaly, and that stated and hidden preferences statistically vary, Barack Hussein Obama may lose the election by a large margin.

THE STANDARD for leadership has been lowered so drastically when verbal eloquence is looked upon suspiciously; when international adulation is greeted as something sinister; when the ability to inspire hope is laughed at derisively. It’s apparent that a large, and growing, minority of Americans don’t want Obama as their president. Never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, perhaps Americans don’t deserve a president that potentially promising. The argument that the presidency is only reserved for old, white males is made even stronger by the candidacy of John McCain, who may become the oldest, whitest president of the United State of America.

LCD Soundsystem

2007-12-30T09:04:00.000-05:00

Last December I requested to write a piece on the DFA DJ’s tour for the magazine I was contributing to at the time, the recently out-of-print Stylus. DJ Shit Robot and LCD Soudsystem’s James Murphy were on the bill and, naturally, I wanted to vouch my journalistic credentials to get access. The Osaka show (where I now live) was their first stop in Japan before flying off to Nigata the next night, and then Tokyo the following night for their final two shows. I wasn’t overly familiar with James Murphy’s work, save for a few singles, and even less so with DJ Shit Robot’s. My desire to write a piece on the show sprang primarily from a ten-minute sequence on Murphy’s recently released, Nike Run commissioned soundtrack, 45:33.

I could neither articulate to myself nor to anyone else how immediately engrossing that sound was. A few of my other colleagues at Stylus had similar reactions, even suggesting that this was the stuff of myth making.

Up until then, James Murphy was essentially known for appropriating all of the heterodox and experimentally precocious musical signifiers from 1978-85; from proto-House and Disco, to Hardcore, New Wave, No Wave and Post-punk, among others. 2002’s “Losing My Edge” was his first salvo. In it Murphy ironically name-checks almost every important band that Brooklynite hipsters should both know and be embarrassed of knowing, parodying the self-defeating accumulation of musical arcana as an arms race—cool as a function of superior information. Murphy’s conceit made you re-think about the way you consumed music and the reasons with which you justified your tastes to your peers and yourself.

Indeed, Murphy seemed to be afflicted by what Harold Bloom once called the Anxiety of Influence, an artist relationship with his precursors and the extent to which their previous works inform and undermine the artist’s creative field of possibilities. Sure Murphy was making incredibly danceable and engaging music, but it wasn’t really his, and anything as obvious as a squall of discordant, atonal guitar bursts (Gang of Four) or wood blocks (Human League) or cowbells (Liquid Liquid) or galloping bass lines (Public Imagine Ltd.) could give away linage. Then Sound of Silver leaked.

I first listened to Sound of Silver on the night of December 5th 2006, a few days before the DFA DJ’s show and a good three months before it was officially scheduled for release. Opener “Get Innocuous” was a standout even though the drumbeat was a recycled base line and the digitally filtered high-hat was straight from “Losing My Edge”.

The song is muscular sounding, and once the back-beat kicks in and the dirge-like electronic vocals overwhelm, the sound gets even more muscular, twitchy and altogether ominous. But two other songs caught my attention, and haven’t let go since. That 10-minute sequence from 45:33 is refashioned into “Someone Great”, a six minute and twenty-six seconds minimalist electro masterpiece.

Descriptions always come up wanting, and near as I can tell so many different reprogrammed and synthesized elements complicate an accurate description of “Someone Great”. The most recognizable sound, though, is a pulsing, alarm-clock repetitive synth organ that expands and contracts in duration and intensity as the other elements build to stifled crescendos. Another synthesized element, wiry and at times wispy, as if it were a computerized saw, counterbalances a kick-drum, deeper, synth organ keyboards, sequenced, higher toned synth keyboard arrangements that seem to tumble forward in odd, choppy, and dissembling chord progressions only to nimbly reassembling in reverse. It’s inventively composed, forming a goose-stepping, highly synchronized rhythm section. Murphy’s falsetto, along with a glistening, pointillist glockenspiel, offers a wan though emotionally melodic surface to the whole production; it bounces and buzzes, expands and constricts, whirs and shivers and hops. It’s a bad heartbeat.

As hollow and easily constructed as the arrangements can appear, put together with Murphy’s lyrics they announce a deeper resonance. “The little things that made me nervous/Are gone in a moment/I miss the way we use to argue/Locked in a Basement”. Many have taken to reading “Someone Great” as tract on the loss of a family member or a loved one, yet these lyrics seem to suggest an alternative, more ambiguous reading. Seen another way, Murphy appears to be mourning the loss of possibility in a relationship: “There’s all the work that needs to be done/It’s late for revision/ There’s all the time and all the planning/And songs to be finished.” The repeated chorus “And it keeps coming”, concluded with “till it stops”, plays up to the monotony of adulthood and the daily minutiae that obscures the emotional or spiritual self.

But even the first reading, of familial loss, registers: “When Someone great is gone/We’re saved for the moment”. It’s a testament to how continually listenable “Someone Great” is that it can refract any number of different readings.

The second song, “All my friends”, is an even more powerful and overwhelmingly stunning work, a kaleidoscopic yarn of nostalgia, and James Murphy’s strongest piece of songwriting to date. A friend of mine described the start of the song as a “computer seizure”, an extended, unvarying cross-rhythm of two piano chords that sandwich a subtle three-note pivot. The piano cycle is either grating or hypnotic if left on its own, but the song begins to shimmers with creeping peripheral ephemera: a crash cymbal struck, a tinsel high-hat marches, rolling tom strikes, and the re-purposed base line and lead guitar rhythms from New Order’s Ceremony. Its components have the cumulative effect of movement, of physical momentum, which seems right given the lyrical strategy.

“That’s how it starts”: As literary if literal a beginning as you’ll find in music, “All My Friends” tracks the ruminations of an aged hipster looking back; from the halcyon glow of newly formed friendships, all night larks, and the youthful ambition and exuberance of wanting to conquer the world, “Set Control for the heart of the Sun”; to the hard facts of life and adulthood changing priorities, “You spent the first five years trying get with the plan/And the next five years trying to be with your friends again”; to the eventual dénouement, “It comes apart”; and all it’s implications, “ Though when we’re running out of the drugs/And the conversation’s grinding away.”

It’s a an achingly pessimistic song about how distance, time and responsibilities make it impossible to ever have those wonderful moments with our friends again, and that each time we attempt to replicate them we are almost always acknowledging this fact. And then we get older, talking, more often than not, of old memories but never really, or ideally, making new ones.

James Murphy’s 37 years old, and the coda to “All My Friends”, as much sweet reminiscence as plaint, is about the anxiety of becoming an adult

Oh, if the trip and the plan come apart in your hand,
you look contorted on yourself your ridiculous prop.
You forgot what you meant when you read what you said,
and you always knew you were tired, but then,
where are your friends tonight?

Because I had recently moved to Japan and was away, really, truly away, from friends and family, starting what felt like an adult life, these two songs, particularly “All of My Friends”, resonated with me. It took over a year of continuously listening to these songs and going through the travails of being an expatriate – the initial cultural shock, the dizzying and astonishing aspect of a different type of living, the homesickness, the new friendships with likeminded expatriates – to truly understand just how much it resonated with my particular situation.

A few days later I would go to the DFA DJ’s show to meet and interview James Murphy. He was good natured and unpretentious. What initially struck me about him was how talkative and open he was. We talked about travel and German toilets. It would never occur to me to ask about those songs or even the album because it was all still metabolism in me. When he went on stage for his set after Shit Robot, I walked over to the bar to get a drink. Moments later Shit Robot, who’ s real name is Marcus Lambkin, joined me at the bar. I asked him what his plans were for the holidays and he told me that he was going back to Germany with his fiancé, who was there that night along with James Murphy’s wife.

I told him that Sound of Silver had leaked, that I had listened to it, and that I thought it was good. He nodded his head, not really responding. Not wanting to but really having to, I asked if he thought James would play anything off Sound of Silver. He said no. He said it was “very personal” to James, so I relented with that line of questioning. At the time I didn’t realize how much more personal it would become for me, too.

45:33

2007-12-24T06:23:00.000-05:00

45:33 leaked sometime in October of 2006, and at the time, apart from the first twenty minutes, I didn’t bother (that is, didn’t have the attention span) to listen to the other twenty-five minutes. Year to date, I’ve only listened to it twelve times, in most cases not all the way through.

John Coltrane’s Ascension comes in at two listens. While the two albums both share the extended play times, 45:33 and Ascension are also alike in their stylistic ambition. The improvisational digressions of Coltrane’s ensemble set the stage for a break from the formalism of the music sheet, creating an unsettling dissonance throughout but ultimately producing a compelling and weighty aesthetic and narrative synthesis. There are times when the trumpet and saxophone solos seem willfully aimless, and in many respects they are, but the overall progression is one of both adventurousness and viruosity.

Likewise, the later third of 45:33, which is preceded by, most notably, a trio of trumpets and frenetic synths that eventually crescendo, seems equally to be in many different places at once and thus, in the end, nowhere. Too many elements are layered on, one after the other, into a kind of micro-produced seizure. An aggressive, reverberating bass line, over-processed and digitally distorted vocals, a skittering drum kit and a constricted piano cycle go on for what seems like forever, only to effervesce beautifully into droning electronic organs and cascading chimes. And this isn’t even the most strikingly powerful sequence on 45:33, of which more later.

Although 45:33 and Ascension are of different times (Ascension was recorded in 1965), one could argue that James Murphy’s 45:33 is in some modest way informed by, and indebted to, Coltrane’s free jazz lodestar—if it isn’t most obviously indebted to Manuel Gottsching’s electronic landmark E2-E4.

6:43 to 17:10 on 45:33 are epochal minutes, minutes that would underwrite my musical and personal excursions in 2007 and set a standard that I will doubtless look back on.

Sound and Sounds

2007-08-20T10:07:00.000-04:00

An aberration on Spoon’s “The Ghost of You Lingers” sounds like a nullity of sound, a tear threatening to void the entire song. A closeted piano cycle, with its tight and odd chord progression, is foregrounded by layered vocals of Brit Daniel’s as echo, apparition, and spurned. “If you were here/Would you calm me down/You settled this part” an affectless Daniel’s offers while a spectral Daniel’s croons “All the strangers in town/Would know if you were here”. “The sleep fled from my eyes” he explains, “And I, know that I need some.” Completing the thought: it’s sleep that Daniel’s needs, and likely a lot of it.

“Ghost” is a small song, slight on musical elements (the somewhat sinister eight-note piano cycle; the falsetto as echo) though sonically pregnant in landscape. That the continued piano cycle remains static closes off any possibility for release. The layered vocals give the effect of oppositional selves, the plaints of lost love and the blank immediacies of present self.

Recall is a form of reconstruction here, and Daniel’s “If” is a conditional for a new possibility. He wants to try again, but is clearly in no shape to do so. There is the hint of paranoia, “All the strangers in town/Would know if you were here”, followed by an admission of instability, “Would you ease my mind?” A shouted “Come on!” seems more forceful than entreating.

So it’s likely the lingering ghost that’s threatening to void the song. That aberration appears in the final third of the song, a jarring distortion so outside of structure as to seem otherworldly, which, it should follow, is the point. Its a grinding and warping sound that repeats itself four other times, trailing off with Daniel’s invocation of “lingers”. The ghost is clearly a reconstruction from memory and haunts Daniel’s deteriorating mind.

Though the song creates a universe of Daniel’s mind on the first few listens, particularized and distant, his plaints are universal: that lost love and its remainder, the often deluded phantoms of memory we’re left to communicate with and ultimately exorcise, will rend us before they are dealt with. Or, put another way, must rend us before they are dealt with.

Convergence

2007-05-14T12:01:00.000-04:00

The Strawman officially turned three on April 18th, which is, in the fickleness and celerity of our current culture, not an insignificant accomplishment. Though, really, what is prideful in celebrating a blog, as dazzling as it is/was at times, left idle, sometimes for months, vacant and seemingly vanquished?

Well, if the absences were necessary and likely unavoidable; if the content produced lacked a certain amount of timeliness and topicality (not merely transcriptions of the apparently endless transcriptions of the apparently endless events, everywhere, that announce themselves as news and boast of their worthiness and therefore require, if not demand, our attention); if, importantly, there was a thoughtfulness and care to both the writing and the intellectual curiosity that provoked the writing (The Subject/The Occasion); and if, finally, it were not an imposition, a joyless task, merely an extension of the modern’s anxious busy work that evades peacefulness or solitude for want of excitement, for fear of loneliness, then pride can be found in small places.

I can admit, somewhat abashedly, that if the amount of writing on this blog, since its inception, has decreased, then, even if by small measures, the quality and interestingness of the content, and hopefully that of the writer, as well, has increased, or matured.

And yet, this blog’s initial mandate was to, as I recall, “pump out as much commentary as is humanly possible-- or at least until I run out of things to comment on”; and while that was a foolhardy scatological salvo into the blinds of the blogosphere, those were the heady and exuberant days when the transcription of the transcription wasn’t banal.

Indeed, in the three years that have elapsed there has been no shortage of available commentary, nearly all of it redundant. Why the commentary is all too available is obvious: the proliferation of New Media platforms (Blogs, Podcast, Vlogs, etc.) and the growing hegemony of content hosts as a means for this dissemination of comment (viz. You tube and Blogger, among others). The growth has been exponential, dizzying.

And while the commentary can neither be entirely discounted nor categorically merited, as a social phenomenon it is far too interesting and historically significant not to reckon with. En masse, a particular demographic from various industrialized countries (U.S, Canada, Europe, Japan) are externalizing thought. What would formally be considered diary entries, quiet ruminations for the writer’s own self-satisfaction (and likely for posterity) appear on the Internet as blog posts, a great number of which go unread.

To be sure, the fact that one’s work can go unread is one of the many appealing qualities of the blog. Additionally, the speed with which an errant thought on Thai cuisine or some effusive praise about The 40 Year Old Virgin or, likewise, a piercing meditation of Kant’s categorical imperatives can be put into writing, often ungrammatically (in both senses), and published online is head turning. The blog, it can be said, is impersonal and conversational in tone and operates on the contradictory assumption that it is both closed off from an audience and laid bear to the world; a diary. But diaries are written to be read, whether by the writer alone or the audience the writer imagines to be witnessing the act. Thus, much of the available comment, if its intentions are advertised or not, seeks some type of recognition.

+ + +

The push for human recognition, which finds its starting point in the Enlightenment with the individual’s autonomy from the monarch, and consequently the monarch’s separation from the state, placed individual liberty at the apex of political thought. Technology, for its part, has been nothing if not the extension of thought, an apparatus to realize in some efficient manner our mental desires and to relieve our material constraints. Scientific rationalism (the application of general science and technologies to the practical problems of modern daily life) and the individual’s political, and therefore private, autonomy have created the modern circumstances for an unprecedented new form of self-expression.

Though, naturally, the access to this form of self-expression is predicated on sociological and economic realities. Blogs are predominately written/accessed by the middleclass; their political and cultural sensibilities generally shape the normative landscape of the blogosphere. Much of the blogosphere is simply many, many over-loud opinions and comments that differ only in degree, but not in kind.

There are so many positions one can take about the Iraq War, and I’ve taken all of them. From pacifist, to Humanitarian interventionist, to the rouge Hawk, and finally, regrettably, to Apathy and Fatigue, the evolution has been a tiring one. The blogosphere, most particularly in its public affairs and political enclaves, requires a discipline of thought, of totalizing omni-reflective thought, both intellectually exhilarating and emotionally, and oftentimes physically, exhausting. One must have a position on everything. And quickly.

If journalism is the first draft of history, blogs are the notes, the kinetic sparks of history the Organism in movement. And no reliable or substantial critical analysis of society, of politics, of culture, can accommodate these demands, nor should it ever aspire to. Which is to say that, while the platforms for New Media are a considerably promising in the development of a participatory citizenship (albeit limited in accessibility), the attendant atmosphere of sound, fury, and celerity tends to be noxious to sober, unadorned thought.

Print publications like the New Yorker and The New Republic (Old Media) who publish long articles and essays are having to contend with the speed of the blogosphere. Going against conventional wisdom, The New Republic (recently purchased by Canadian media conglomerate CanWest) will now publish bi-weekly, on glossier paper, and double its content, which, in a time where speed carries more currency than thoughtful opinion, is welcomed.

+ + +

But isn’t this necessarily an excuse or rationalization for inactivity, for pointless navel gazing while crenels of the political and cultural events of our time pop furiously? Yes and No. The dynamism of New Media platforms greatly narrows the gap of event and coverage to near simultaneity. As quickly as it occurs, it is reported, chewed over, hastily contextualized and then re-contextualized. The media culture is ravenous, nearly cannibalistic, implicating all, consuming everything. An event is devoured and quickly excreted in almost light speed, never truly digested in the process.

This is where, I suspect, deliberative, dry analysis intercedes, to collect all of these undigested and indigestible parts of social material, as paleontologist do, and create an explicable if not entirely comprehensive narrative of the components, the players, and, often, the sheer randomness of past events. So, ultimately, it is not a zero-sum game where New Media will win simply by foot speed. Instead, Old and New media can act as adjuncts to each other while competing for the same audience and complimenting the desires of their readership.

On Faces: Facebook/False Intimacies

2007-05-08T13:11:00.000-04:00

(Some preliminary and still gestating thoughts)

I hate social networking. Only after much scorn and derision and coercion did I relent and place a profile on Facebook. Naturally it was under a fake name with no picture and no likelihood of activity. Not so, it seems. It began with a little gravity, things pulling themselves to me, disparate pieces of a life left behind shifting orbit, coming closer. People I had no intention or desire to ever talk to again started "poking" me, importuning, insisting that we be "friends", again. And who could deny a classmate from elementary school, who's heart is so cold, so closed off? Who could begrudge us that innocence, that naivety, of secret hand shakes, ashen legs, red faces?

No one. Not then. We were young then. But now? What are we after? No one is denied; everyone must enter your life again, and enter with a crooked smile and false bonhomie, or you will pay with psychic dread. Am I a bad person? Is my network of friends inclusive enough? If she is on his list and I am on his list, will she understand why she can't be on my list? And then thought collapse on itself, to the subject: why am I not on his or her list? What is my worth?

And suddenly your social currency is only validated, or not, when you check your inbox, your mind doing revolutions, needlessly, about people you may or may not ever see again, physically. But they will haunt you each time you visit your page, their words will bleed through your wall, offering intimacies to strangers, to you. This person you went to Univeristy with; this person you meet through an organization; this person who knows this person you know; this person who knows far too much about you.

Anything pushed to its extreme winds up having its opposite effect. When at first you wanted everyone closer, just at your finger tips, just in case, just to type those easy wittcisms and then return to more important things--you are now bound. Either be online and not reply; be busy and not reply; or disappear entirely. This is not a community of fellow travlers; this is the tyrany of the group.

Like a Doctor?

2007-03-12T02:18:00.000-04:00

This typifies how incredibly derelict I was in following the goings-on in Canadian political life during my long absence. It would be embarrassing had I not had a credible excuse. Even so, I actually remember watching the hearings, surprised like everyone else to witness Zaccardelli's pitiful evasions, evasions so patently without sincerity, so wincingly lawyerly, it seemed obvious to most that Zaccerdelli got talking points from the PMO. And it wasn't as though the Harper government had to worry about culpability; the entire Arar mess took place under the previous Liberal Government, which led many to suspect that the Conservative government was more interested in saving face and not appearing weak by having to firing Zaccardelli.

But the ignorance Zaccardelli claimed to the details of the Arar arrest, rendition, and detention was both comical and pathetic. And since he changed his orginal statement, it's difficult to determine whether or not he was simply protecting himself or the organizational hierarchy of the RCMP.

Nonetheless, that it took $25,000 in taxpayers monies (of which I will contribute nothing in the fiscal year of 2007) to prepare Zaccardelli for the parlimentary hearing seems a tad excessive, considering all he was required to do, as Liberal MP Sue Barnes notes, was "tell the truth to Canadians." The $25,000 fee for consultation went to Ottawa PR firm McLoughlin Media, whose only comment on the matter reads thusly:

We're a private company, and part of what we do is to never talk about the people that we may or may not have worked with. It's inappropriate. It's like being a lawyer or a doctor.

I wonder what that's like? Being like a lawyer or a doctor...

Japan Times

2007-03-09T10:25:00.001-05:00

Tokyo Sushi - Osaka Roll
Originally uploaded by Jon ..

I moved to Japan. That was around five months ago. Not that anyone really visited this site in the first place, but I felt it somewhat necessary after such a long absence to, at the very least, post a few sentences. First, I was without Internet for a two-month period. This, naturally, was soul crushing. It was also an incredibly contemplative time. I didn’t even bother reading the English dailies, nor did I bother to follow the news through that ingenious piece of technology that is my cell phone. The Democrats took Congress; Dion won the Liberal Leadership; Saddam was hung; a rare, prehistoric shark with florescent eyes was spotted in the Japan Sea. Bits and pieces of the outside world sooner or later emanated toward me., unbidden, without my active effort.

I began learning Japanese, to which, at this point, I can claim no mastery. I traveled. I read. I stood still. I did battle with Onsen . I lost spectacularly, each time resolving to begin again. And I did. And so I will.

High on Sorkin

2006-09-19T00:49:00.000-04:00

We here at the Strawman love, love Aaron Sorkin. We love his wit, his assured charm, his facility with the spoken and written word, and, not least, his overall bravura. The guy’s got chops. If we didn’t love the entirety of A Few Good Men (adapted from his Broadway play) we certainly loved that testy verbal exchange between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson near the end. You remember, “I want the Truth”; “You Can Handle the Truth”. (Actually, that’s rather topical with respect to the whole definition of torture debate going on. But anyway)

And let us not forget our love for West Wing, that White House Drama about the political machinations and fascinating personalities at the highest level of government. We remember downloading all of the episodes we missed, watching them more than twice, if only to follow the oftentimes hurried and inscrutable dialogue. We were sad to see it go off the air, but not surprised. We barely watched the last two seasons. And when Leo (John Spencer) died, well, what was left to say? President Bartlet was succeeded by President-Elect Santos -- both democrats, as fanciful as that was. But the show’s decline began when its writer and creator, Aaron Sorkin, was fired two seasons prior. And of course, he needed a Job, so he went to Hollywood.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is Sorkin’s new job, and he’s brought along Bradley Whitford from the West Wing. The show revolves around the behind-the-scene travails of a Saturday Night Live type production where Whitford and Mathew Perry (of Friends fame) are tasked to helm writing and directing responsibilities. Perry, the writer, has an addiction (or will likely develop one) to painkillers. Both Sorkin and Perry have had histories of drug addiction, so the casting is both self-referentially smirking at us, and so Meta as to be absurd. The charcters were already unbelieveable to begin with, and even more so now. Moreover, it’s self-flattery of the most cringe-inducing sort that Perry’s character is a brilliant award-wining writer, formerly of the NBS network, from where he was fired three years prior, only to be asked back to the network.

Everything about S60SS is self important and bloated, much like the West Wing. The only difference between two, however, is that the bloat and self-importance was necessary for the subject matter of the West Wing, whereas S60SS feels incredibly self-satisfied, not to mention self-masturbatory. When you write about politics at the highest level, seriousness, vapid moralizing, and false, if bien-pensantt, equivalencies are what one traffics in without regard to accuracy. The source material is the White House. But when its Hollywood, and it’s about a “comedy show” and the guys who run it—pah-leas. Which is to say I found nothing particularly compelling about S60SS, nor was any of Sorkin’s script for the pilot the least bit memorable. Needless to say, I didn’t like, and now await its inevitable cancellation.

Mea without the Culpa

2006-09-17T10:42:00.000-04:00

After some infelicitous words about Mohammed's teachings and their broader implications on the essence of Islam, namely that they resulted in “evil” and “inhuman” things, the Pope is backtracking. Sort of:

“At this time I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims”

Right. Obviously the emphasis is mine. The Pope’s non-apology turns on rhetorically self-protecting phrases like being deeply sorry “for the reactions”, but not for the actual remarks which, of course, he had the right, and good sense, not to make. Also, that he thinks his remarks “were considered offensive” regardless of whether or not “he” considered them offensive (where he remains silent) elides responsibility again. Although, if he truly believed they were offensive it’s unlikely he would've made them in the first place.

But in the Pope’s defense, the remarks he made where quoted from a medieval text, from which he took the caution to explicitly attribute (“and I quote” etc.) And yet that seems to confound the Pope's conduct, since it must have been clearly obvious to him the incendiary nature of his remarks and the likely response.

Idlewild

2006-08-25T21:45:00.000-04:00

I got my hands on a ~~leaked version~~ review copy of Idlewild about two weeks ago and after repeated listening have nothing exactly laudatory to say. What’s worse is that I don’t think it’s any better than Speakerboxxx/The Love Below , which is a shame because I didn’t find that any better than Stankonia. Needless to say, Aquemini was the tops for me, and, sadly, Qutkast has generally fallen off since then. Or is it simply a divergence of creative vision between Dre and Big Boi?

From what I’ve read, Idlewild the motion picture is no different from their working relationship of late. While Dre and Big Boi appear together at beginning of the film, they pretty much share no screen time for the rest of Idlewild. The same goes for the soundtrack.

Dre continues his falsetto treacle as a poor soloist on his end of the disc with cringe inducing tracks like “Chronomentrophobia”, a patently silly mess, and “Greatest Show On Earth”, which features the raspy wheeze of Macy Gray introducing herself and then saying, right after, “I don’t give a damn”. It’s actually kind of funny. “Life is Like a Musical”, a tropically cloying synth-organ-ed jaunt, could’ve been longer.

As for Big Boi, the first single, “Morris Brown”, is a particularly affecting cymbal/bass/drum banger. And that hook is killer. August horns and a wistful chorus elevate “The Train”, Big Boi weaving a typically candid narrative. And yet as a synthesis Idlewild works far better than the partitioned sb/tlb, as well as containing stronger stand alone songs – no “Hey Ya!” here, but solid nonetheless.

But of course the track no one should sleep on is “Hollywood Divorce”, featuring Lil’ Wayne, Snoop, Dre, and Big Boi. Someone turned out the lights. Creepy ass organs sound off. An electronic snare, or what sounds like one, chops up the track awkwardly. Lil’ Wayne’s sixteen is solid and sleepy, while Dre and Big Boi eat up the track entirely. Snoop’s seems like an afterthought.

Miami Vice

2006-08-13T23:34:00.000-04:00

I went to see this a couple of weekends ago and was generally surprised at how well Michael Mann turned the Regan era decadence and gloss of the original into a darker, more filmic monster. To be sure, Mann is the maestro of cool when it comes to the drug/crime/underworld genre with films like Heat and more recently Collateral. The subjects of his films are always the most priapic, brooding men surrounded by all of the finest accouterments someone of their level of coolness would naturally have, or failing that, already integrated into the mythology machine of Cool. Ali and Heat are fine examples of this. To wit: Miami Vice is touched with the Mann imprimatur of coolness in a ways far more cinematic, if not experimentally challenging, than his earlier films. Visually, Miami Vice is jarringly dissonant while proving consistently engaging.

The opening club scene of Farrell and Foxx surveying a packed dance floor, a Jay-Z/Linkin Park mash-up punctuating the hard and tight shot changes, draws the viewer into the quieted of cacophony. It’s too easy to get lost in the jumble of situations such as these, but Farrell and Foxx cut through the crowd with an eerie stoicism to dispatch of some bad characters. Like the club scenes in Collateral an austere tone pervades the surface, nearly embedding itself into the content of the scene. The sound and disorder is the scene and everything else going on -- the breaking of hands, the knocking down of random people -- is simply the medium Mann pushes it through. It’s really difficult to follow, but somehow it all makes sense.

When Farrell and Foxx make their way to the rooftop of the club we get a panoramic cityscape of Miami, thunderbolts trembling and lighting flares igniting. Farrell and Foxx are placed at the bottom centre to bottom right of the shot, never truly its focal point. I want to say this was Mann being unintentional about ontology and simply being inured by the “great shot”, but I’d be hard pressed. I’d suggest that the shot’s ontology (and likely that of the film) is itself. It exist for itself and not the characters, hence the visual marginalization or de-emphasis of Farrell and Foxx. Another interesting aspect of the shot is the grainy patina of the high definition camera, which comes off as chintzy, so much so that it’s nearly boiled down to comic book storyboarding. Yet this is what also places the surrealism onto your lap, so to speak: one can’t help but feel either inside or outside this technical strategy’s conceit. My friend was not willing to commit this and so began rolling his eyes in anticipated exasperation. I, however, was following.

Farrell and Foxx are off to find a wayward friend now. An ingenious Viper camera slides overtop and beside other traffic while following their car. The high definition renders everything anxiously, evoking more a mood than a narrative. And this is the general problem people have with Miami Vice, that of the narrative being threadbare or virtually non-existent or, worse still, pointless. These, I take it, are backhanded compliments, in a way, since Mann is hardly working for a narrative, not in the least. To rehearse a police procedural of the likes of Miami Vice would be to revisit all of the torpid clichés and stock gimmicks we typically get from the police/crime procedurals. We saw Bad Boys 2, we know the deal. Mann, however, has supplied literally no back-story for either of his leads, Crocket and Tubbs, and portrayed their relationship, usually a jocular camaraderie, as distant but not cold.

What follows is an exercise in the inscrutable; we understand nothing deeper or more enlightening about the characters, their development or necessary trajectory leading us nowhere particularly interesting.

The mood is the subject. The mise en scene is the mood, and the characters and whatever paltry narrative is offered are not figures standing on top of the mise en scene but necessarily ground into it. I’m still attempting to unpack my thoughts on all of this, so excuse me if this sounds maddeningly obtuse. But my take is that Mann has created something very evocative and visceral here, something very akin to what Terrence Malick accomplished in The New World, a film that elicited a similarly appealing if not altogether perplexing set of emotional responses. I can say that I like both. And maybe like isn’t the right word. But I can say that both films were challenging, both intellectually and perceptually.

Not unrelatedly, I read a story of theaters in Japan spraying particular scents during particular scenes in a movie to heighten the realism, like grass when the scene is in a field. The olfactory sense allows the viewer to experience the film at another level. Something like this is going on in Miami Vice albeit at another, cognitively novel level. Sure it’s a movie you see – but it’s also one that you feel.

China, Russia and the New World Order.

2006-07-06T00:12:00.000-04:00

And therein lies the dilemma. With all the hemming and hawing going on in American political circles (or perhaps it’s only the cable news outlets) there is nothing short of military intervention the United States can do to North Korea -- nothing they could have done during the first Bush Administration, nothing they could have done during Clinton’s eight years in office. The balance of power rests with China and Russia, and regardless of North Korea’s varied and often times paltry attempts at saber-rattling, the United States, even along with any support the EU can provide, isn’t in a position to do much. The UN is ineffectual in the sense that it’s always been the formal face of naked power politics.

During the cold war, the Security Council didn’t work, or was a joke. And while the Berlin Wall was being dissembled and the halcyon years of the 90’s were being ushered in, the unipolar world historian and political scientists anticipated already had a best before date. China and Russia have and will always be that counterweight to US hegemony; this is simply a fact of international relations.

That North Korea can act like they have, drawing worldwide rebuke, proving nothing but there military incompetence (the missiles failed during launch) and still draw no Security Council support for sanctions from neither Russia nor China speaks to the natural symmetry geopolitics necessarily assumes, or will eventually revert back to. All that talk about American Empire now seems woefully premature if not altogether silly.

Not Cool.

2006-06-07T01:13:00.000-04:00

As quick as I am to disparage Stephen Harper and his Conservative government, as loath as I am to admit that he's doing some counterintuitvely interesting things (the play for the middle-class, enticing the immigrant vote, out-moderating the Liberals) I am clearly not in favor of beheading our Prime Minister -- not in an ironical sense, not in metaphorical sense, and likely not in a fictional sense (at least not now, since it'll likely be over-done).

And so the recent terror arrests still have me a little nonplussed; how exactly Canada is a credible target -- not that other nations are more deserving -- strikes me as absurd. But we are -- and if the allegations prove to be accurate, sensational as they are, it's an entirely different ballgame; and as much as we'd wish we weren't, Canadians are in the field of play.

n+1

2006-05-14T19:32:00.000-04:00

The newest issue of n+1, Reconstruction, arrived on Tuesday, and it’s a thick one. The Intellectual Scene column chronicling the piquant cultural ruminations of our hapless, misanthropic, and nameless narrator has been interrupted, apparently as a result of fact that "our culture and everyday life may not exist in their current form much longer." He will, if we are lucky, likely return for issue # five.

But the gauntlet has been dropped, and this interruption prefaces a piece by Chad Harbach on the ever-contentious and now au courant debates concerning the threat of Global Warming. That we have crossed the point at which reversal is no longer an option; that our technological capabilities and our capitalist market economies disregard both social and environmental externalities; that having escaped, if only for the time being, the threat of mutual nuclear destruction has afforded us a comfort only borne of complacence is essentially what Harbach’s getting at. And now with climate patterns varying wildly - floods, hurricanes, tornados, sun nearly every day in February (in Ontario) - the thought that it is not each other we should fear but, instead, mother nature's impending wrath or revenge, what have you, is the comeuppance we'll deserve.

Meanwhile, I haven't looked through the entire issue yet, deferring to read and savor it in portions, but it's turning out to be one of the more interesting issues. The flame war between critic James Wood and novelist Jonathan Franzen continues with a Franzen letter to the editors. Franzen is incredulous to Woods imputation that he practices a “Thin Aestheticism.”

The first salvo, if it could be called that, was Wood's review of Franzen's The Corrections for the New Republic. In it, Wood invoked Franzen's infamous Harper's essay, a lamentation on the diminishing possibility of the Social Novel, which he called "intelligent" and "affecting" but also "long" and incoherent. Of Franzen's solution, now having relented on the idea of a Social Novel altogether, Wood detected a "Thin Aestheticism" in Franzen’s tone; Franzen's tacit intention was now, as he saw it, "To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them."

And it was back in issue # three, Reality Principle, in which Wood was replying to the editors’ churlish assessment of the negative tendency literary criticism had taken, that Wood re-invoked Franzen's "Thin Aestheticism". Although, to be fair, he believed that Franzen couldn't really adhere to something of the sort. Franzen has taken exception to this by responding that he'd like to admire Wood but can't really trust him. At one level Franzen has misread Wood and Wood has misunderstood Franzen. Yet on another, they disagree on the means, though the constituent parts of a novel turn out to say something social nonetheless.

Further on in issue # four we get a trenchant survey of American Writing Today, of which Keith Gessen's essay on Money and publishing is a must read. On balance, the issue seems a strong one.

A day without irony

2006-05-01T10:47:00.000-04:00

What universe do we live in when Daryn Kagan of CNN can say "It looks like a victory for the former stripper Anna Nicole Smith at the US-Supreme court" without a hint of irony? But hat-tip to ANS who is owed something in the order of $200 million dollars. That aphorism about there not being enough money in the world to buy class and whatnot may, in this instance, not obtain. Certainly one could buy a modicum of class or, at the very least, something resembling class with $200 million dollars.

Non-sequiturs

2006-04-27T15:16:00.000-04:00

Gerard Kennedy, former Ontario education miniter, is running for the Liberal leadership. His intention: "To make Canada the first international country in the world." Really? And I actually like this guy. He seems (or seemed) compentent, was doing yeoman's work re-conceptualizing Ontario's pitful education system, particularly the Secondary Schools. In general, he didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd say this type of non-sense. Maybe I'm misunderstanding him, but it wouldn't have hurt to be a little more clear.

The Guggenheim

2006-04-24T18:32:00.000-04:00

Last week at around this time I was making my way through Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural lodestar, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Only after scrutinizing as many pieces of David Smith's contorted steel sculpture as was humanly possible in two hours, I realized that a Wassily Kandinsky exhibit was also showing and, fortuitously, stumbled into the right room.

And I can't say that I'm too much of a fan. There seems to be a saccharine quality to Kandinsky's work, an overwhelming surfeit of color that can induce nausea. His geometric work, which is generally considered his later work, strikes me as more interesting. And yet.

Blue Mountains, Kandinsky

Little did I know that the Museum's permanent collection, the Thannhauser collection, was available for viewing and not in the vault as I suspected -- whereas some Museums think it wise to place their Warhols and Hockneys, their only draws no doubt, in the vault. So I got to see some Cubists, Braque and Picasso, and some Impressionists, Manet, Passario, Monet (whose work I didn't get to see at the Louvre); and two unlikely corresponding contemporaries, Gauguin and Van Gogh; and a slew of contemporary art: de Kooning, Pollack, Stella, Kline, Gottlieb, Rothko, if they could be considered contemporary in any proper sense.

The Bowl of Grapes, Braque

Since I had to go back to Connecticut that night, I didn't get a chance to get to MoMA, spending most of my time either wandering around Central Park or trying to catch celebs on 5th or Central Park West.

cadenceweapon

2006-04-14T12:59:00.000-04:00

I'm literally out the door on my way to Connecticut, so I'll dispense with all the formalities. I'll comment later on the CYHSY show at the Oprea House last weekend (Crazy!) and the Ralston Saul Lecture at Western (Yawn). But I can't seem to get this ridiculous (as in good) song out of my head,here.

Betwixt and Between

2006-03-24T17:07:00.000-05:00

The Great Game has begun again in an entirely different context. This time, instead of Central Asia it’s Eastern Europe, predominantly Orthodox Christian countries. And instead of Britain (essentially the EU countries) it’s the United States facing off against Russia in a stealth game of geopolitical proxy chicken. No military engagement seems necessary; rather, it’s the ineluctable march of democracy that appears to be driving these successive revolutions. First, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, technically in Central Asia, but a former Soviet republic nonetheless, and then the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, another former soviet republic, followed by what will be the Belarusian revolution, another breakaway Soviet republic.

This is an unwelcome development for Russia, who, even after the end of the Cold war, has always maintained a de facto regional sway over these republics, favoring and propping up Moscow friendly strongmen like Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine, and now Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. It is almost certain that Lukashenko will share the same fate of both Shevardnadze and Yanukovych, considering the circumstances are exactly the same. In the Georgian and Ukrainian contretemps, election results that were widely regarded as fraudulent resulted in civil unrest, which lead to international opprobrium and calls for either new elections, with credible international monitors of course, the path the Ukraine took, or the dissolution of government entirely, the way that Georgia went. And it’s obvious who benefited.

Mikhail Saakashvili, a graduate of Columbia Law School in the U.S and now president of Georgia, and Viktor Yushchenko, president of Ukraine, are pro-western, or more clearly, leaders of a neo-liberal bent. They are seen as integral pieces in wresting the reins of regional power from Russia. And although the United States and to a lesser extent the EU have no direct involvement in these developments (it may be patently obvious though) they have myriad indirect associations – because, in the end, it’s beneficial for them.

For instance, George Soros’ Open Society and the Liberty Institute, among numerous others, are private foundations that aim to shape international public and social policy, putatively, but are instead proxies that help foment civil protest against authoritarian governments, or primarily Eastern European governments, the type of concerted and behind-the-scenes actions that spelt the end of the Cold War. But is this a necessarily bad thing?

I’m always skeptical of arguments that discount the intentions of Georgians and Ukrainians' desire to have more transparent, less authoritarian government. Does a little push along hurt matters? Granted, the type of government that takes form after said ‘push along’ is where the issue turns. Would they be encouraged (forced) to remove all import tariffs, open up financial markets, sell off national resources at fire-sale prices, Privatize! Privatize! Privatize! and generally prostrate themselves to be a (subordinate) friend of the West?

This is a legitimate concern, one that can be countered by citing the experience of the Ukraine presently. It’s seems that just two years after the Orange revolution Viktor Yushchenko is having some trouble implementing his neo-liberal agenda, add that to the economic slow down in the region, and Mr. Yushchenko may lose the upcoming parliamentary elections. The answer, then, to neo-liberal hegemony, particularly in this case, seems to be the electorate’s desire for representative democracy and accountable government, a novel and historically well-tested concept the apathetic West should consider revisiting

And the two seemingly unrelated stories I came across today begin to cohere: The first, the US joining the EU in sanctions against Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko following, you guessed it, questionable election results; The second, more ominous, the Pentagon releasing a report that claims the Russian Foreign Ambassador in Iraq (sounds redundant) provided military intelligence to Saddam during the weeks preceding the US lead invasion, or war. That’s a twofer: one a slap on the wrist against Belarus, and by extension Russia, the other a direct shot square in the nose. But how will Russia counter? The Great Game continues.

Special Ops

2006-03-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for visiting our Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Yes it looks like a cynical photo-op, and yes all those “mission accomplished” analogies can be raised; but because of the recent spat of intense attacks our soldiers have been under, this visit was both a morale booster and a politically astute move, considering the icy relationship between Mr. Harper and the media.

And yet on another level it begs for an actual public dialogue on Canada’s role in Afghanistan, something the Conservatives have thus far been unwilling to allow in Parliament. If Mr. Harper believes it was important to visit the troops, then it should follow that a public debate on their mission, if only to affirm its significance, should be convened in the house. Mr. Harper's trip only make this more likely, and attempts to rule out one only makes his jaunt to Afganistan that much more superficial.

Moving on

2006-03-08T17:19:00.000-05:00

My apologizes to Mr. Haggis for my earlier vitriol against his, still undeserved, Best Picture win. Although it may appear to be the case, my protestations toward Crash having nothing to do with closeted homosexual sentiments and/or proclivities. And this is not to say that Brokeback Mountain isn’t at the political vanguard in normalizing the depiction of gay romance, which it is, but that it’s more than that: It’s really beautiful filmmaking; probably the best in some years, in my opinion. (OK, I’ll watch Junebug and Cache and then contextualize my praise for Brokeback.)

But the issue I have with Crash, along with many other dissenters, is how patently absurd it is. It’s flat out bad filmmaking, which makes all of this dissent revolve around aesthetics or form, even if the content is similarly hackneyed. Altmanesque ensemble cast: check. Conveniently interconnected narratives: check. Self-importance cudgel: check. Subtly: not check. I’d be rehearsing a number of points I’ve read in other places if I continue, points that were better elaborated and far sharper, so suffice it to say that Crash is a bad, bad, bad film. I can’t fight it, so I’ll just move on.

Against Crash, or why the Oscars are irrelevant

2006-03-06T00:33:00.000-05:00

I’m calling bullshit on the Academy giving Crash the Oscar for Best Picture. Crash is an incredible film in the sense that real people don’t have conservations the way Crash has depicted them. Real people have psychological motives and a modicum of manners and better things to do with their time than blurt-out silly and unprovoked racial epithets. Despite its stirring second act, in which deus ex machinas abound to conveniently resolve all of the implausible if otherwise charming narratives, Crash is still a garbage film penned by a sentimentally manipulative hack (see Million Dollar Baby) It was obvious as the err occurred, Jack Nicholson opening the envelope, calling the wrong name: “Crash?”

There was a collective gasp which I’m sure Ang Lee, after receiving the Oscar for Best Director and being quickly shuttled off stage, registered. They didn’t cut to a shot of Heath Ledger or Jake Gyllenhaal or any one else in building but the cast of Crash and their hack of a director Paul Haggis. Yes, they wanted to capture the winners. But guess what – nobody else was smiling.

And if you think that Crash was some type of commentary on contemporary race relations, and that it somehow addressed our messy polarities – what we say to ourselves and how we act with others – then you are exactly the type of useful idiot who’d bite.

Crash isn’t any of these things and is far less ambitious in its reach than the charlatan down the street or that clown at your office claims. It neither answers questions nor raises them. It’s an awful film. I hate it more now that it has won an Oscar. And this is tokenism of the highest order: to prop up a film as a lode star for a dialogue on race – a film that is criminally inane, a film that is thus charged with negligence for the harm that it will no doubt inflict.

So go forth and talk amongst your friends and family about how Crash changed your life. Tell your children about how Crash dealt with real people talking about race frankly. And it’s surely fitting that Haggis quoted Brecht, saying that “Art isn’t a Mirror, it’s a Hammer” which I guess is supposed to shape society.

Listen to Haggis’s admission: he’s not interested in reflecting society, since he couldn’t care less how real people talk to each other about race. And I’m not understating how he’s shaping it. Bertolt Brecht was overtly political in his drama; Paul Haggis is a hack. For a film purportedly interested in society and race, Crash isn’t political in any regard.

Sunday

2006-03-05T17:18:00.000-05:00

A ridiculously absurd but altogether fascinating excerpt from Rolling Stone’s stunning look inside Scientology,

Both of Natalie’s parents are Clear (ridding one’s self of the reactive mind), she says. Her Grandmother is what’s called an “Operating Thetan,” “OT.” So is Tom Crusie, who is near the top of Scientology’s Bridge, at a level known as OT VII. OT’s are Scientology’s elite -- enlightened beings who are said to have total “control” over themselves and their environment. OT’s can allegedly move inanimate objects with their minds, leave their bodies at will and telepathically communicate with, and control the behavior of, both animals and human beings. At the highest level, they are allegedly liberated from the physical universe, to the point where they can psychically control what Scientologists call MEST: Matter, Energy, Space and Time.

I guess this explains that missing clip from Thank You for Smoking at this year’s Sundance. But it doesn’t explain why Tom Crusie hasn’t won an Oscar yet, or managed to control the behavior of Paparazzi.

An aside: Saw Brokeback. Verged on tears. Will win Oscar. Ledger, I think, was much better than Hoffman, though I did enjoy Capote. Without Gyllenhaal Brokeback is a different film, so I’m going with another upset. I don’t think either Syriana or Good Night, and Good Luck necessarily warrant the type of attention they’ve received – I see them working on a political level, as commendable agitprop, but as strong cinema they don’t cut it for me. (This notwithstanding David Strathairn's superb performance in Goodnight) Aberrations like Munich and, let us not forget the highly manipulative, Crash strike me as wrongheaded in light of Cronenberg’s outstanding A History of Violence. Even considering all its hype, which should work more as detriment to a film of its quality, Brokeback is one of the best films of the last 6 years.

Harrison Ford as Harrison Ford

2006-02-23T15:04:00.000-05:00

Ever since he abandoned us for his waif of a girlfriend, the delusional, GGI-baby-dancing Calista Flockhart, Harrison Ford has managed to stay off the Hollywood grid, most likely brooding, or whatever else he does in between brooding. And why shouldn’t he have? He, like no other Movie Star of his Boomer generation, has been the gold standard at the box office. Star Wars and Indiana Jones were so seminal as to create their own genre. Not only that, Harrison Ford seemed to have inaugurated a modern turn on a familiar archetype: the acerbic, anti-authority world-weary Man with a capital 'M'. The center of gravity for any movie, then, became the extent to which Harrison Ford could exude the gravitas synonymous with this archetype. So it was only logical that Han Solo and Indiana Jones become founts of masculinity, never truly Organization men, perpetually eschewing norms, unabashedly churlish and maybe even sexist at times, but always there to help us out of a pinch.

Alternatively, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and Blade Runner were just the type of art-house fare that conferred on him the knowing nods and begrudging respect of aficionados, even if he was still Harrison Ford the Movie Star. And who can forget his competent if short stint as CIA operative Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger? While the passable yet patently absurd Fugitive turnouts out to be, well, passable, Air Force One, even in those halcyon days that precede the Terror Wars of today, augured some kind finality. Harrison Ford the Movie Star, our cultural archetype for the Everyman, was quickly becoming a cliché of himself.

But all this shouldn’t matter. Six Days Seven Nights shouldn’t Matter. Hollywood Homicide, especially, shouldn’t matter. Anything from 1998 going forward shouldn’t matter for reasons less articulate but more quantifiable. $5.65 billion dollars: a great number in the abstract, yes, but all the more persuasive to the calculations of studio execs. This is the kind of monopoly money that entrenches a Movie Star and, perhaps, allows him to transcend type and self -- and just be. Having been an integral part of movies that grossed over or around $5.65 billion dollars internationally, the highest of any other actor (Samuel L. Jackson’s demurrals notwithstanding), Harrison Ford just is. And while none of this should matter, it is the problem that greets us in his latest offering, the claustrophobic thriller Firewall.

Jack Stanfield is the head of network security at a bank in Seattle. The conceit we are to believe is that Harrison Ford isn’t Harrison Ford but instead Jack Stanfield. Harrison Ford is 62 and his only familiarity with computer technology is as Han Solo. There were no such things as personal computers in 1977. But why quibble? That urbane and relentlessly charming Paul Bettany gets all campy as the film’s villain -- sneering, flaring his lips, looking as menacing as a hot-tempered Jimmy Carter. This is the type of method acting where one recites ‘paycheck’ over and over to suspended one’s own disbelief. Virginia Madsen as Harrison Ford’s wife similarly ratchets up the dolor:
“Who’s picking their scripts?” is one question.

But because the movie’s name is Firewall and Mr. Stanfield works at a bank: expect the villain to use the family as leverage, declaring to kill them if $100 million dollars isn’t transferred from the bank into his offshore account. And of course the $100 million dollars sounds derivative; the movie isn’t shy about its banality. In a way, though, it is novel that they wire Mr. Stanfield with modern accouterments, so we and they are able to follow his every move. One slip-up and that’s it for his family. Although when said slip-up comes about, Paul Bettany is unserious. A villain must be serious in his convictions otherwise he’s not a villain -- he’s just simulacrum. When a villain says he’s going to break your son’s knee -- he should. And when a villain starts killing his own henchmen -- who’d have a hard time convincing SAG that they were actors -- it’s not only a logistical mess, it hurts morale and is flat out silly. I say break the boy’s knee.

We are hopeful when Virginia Madsen says to her daughter “This is going to be over very soon”, but she is lying, there is still another interminable hour. What follows is Harrison Ford with implacable brow; Harrison Ford and inaudible grunts; Harrison Ford running toward the camera, smoldering with intensity or consternation or hunger; Harrison Ford scaling buildings; Harrison Ford bludgeoning a man to death with a coffee urn; Harrison Ford skulking in the corner, somehow being setup for another murder; Harrison Ford standing over his friend’s dead body, unthinkingly grabbing the gun that killed him and leaving his prints; Harrison Ford tracking blood all over the walls. Let us all remember that Harrison Ford is a mature 62. He just may be getting too old for this.

The badness of this movie almost seems purposeful. At the mercy of convention, the director seems to have decided to cleave so single-mindedly to genre that the movie is left without stylistic variation. And the technology meme is just too ephemeral for a movie purportedly called Firewall. But the movie ultimately announces its own badness by recycling a cliché: Harrison Ford. Excuse me for being under-whelmed, but Mr. Ford has moved from Archetype to Cliché, his former identity buried under heaps and heap of re-presentation. Harrison Ford is indistinguishable from any roles he portrays because Harrison Ford is always Harrison Ford. Why isn’t this a problem for, say, Anthony Hopkins? Simple. Movie Stars get old; Actors get better parts.

Bush Determined To Change Message

2006-01-26T00:49:00.000-05:00

Certainly one of the funniest headlines of 2006: Bush: Bin Laden Should Be Taken Seriously; via Yahoo news, courtesy of the AP wire service. I guess now is probably a better time than not to take Osama bin Laden seriously, seeing as how he’s kind of responsible for that whole 9/11 thingy, and, somehow, over the last four years since the attack has released more mix tapes than Tony Touch.

Now everything Bush is saying shouldn’t be glossed over so quickly; hey, don’t roll those eyes ceiling-ward, please no audible sighs. Pay attention. Said Bush: “When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it”. And Bush should know. Everyone is now already familiar with that cryptic August 6th, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US. In it, among other things, was this indecipherable nonsense:

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

I’m no intelligence analyst sifting through recondite classified data, but I’m fairly certain that upon seeing this briefing, I would have done something other than stay at the Ranch. But this briefing, apparently, wasn’t evidence enough to take Bin Laden serious, it would seem.

So today Bush needed to reiterate the gravity of this craven man’s intention, if only to respond to Bin Laden’s recent release already climbing the charts. Bush made his 'little' speech, as irony would have it, inside the National Security Agency, wherein the putatively 'legal' wiretappings of American citizens are being conducted. (Clearing throat sonorously). Yes, that NSA!

It turns out that Mr. Bush is doing that cynical sleight of hand routine again. “See, Bin Laden is serious about attacking us. Therefore, my possibly illegal surveillance program is justified. Isn’t it?” Not likely.

When it was easy enough to get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant, even 72 hours after said act of surveillance, Bush didn’t. Bush attempted to justify his administration’s actions first by referencing the Iraq resolution, which nobody was buying, and then reaching for historical precedent, asserting that Lincoln and Roosevelt had availed themselves of the inherent right of the President in protecting the country. This inherent right is to be found somewhere in the Constitution, but the trouble is that it’s not there.

Enter Bin Laden, Mr. al-Qaida, Mr. Terror par excellence, and ‘justification number three for thus far illegal surveillance program’. And I’m not entirely adverse to the genuine need for some type of surveillance program because, pace Bush, if someone from al-Qaida is calling you, I want to know. Though, let’s not be naïve and pretend like something of this nature never existed before; it did, albeit on a far limited scale. After 9/11 national security couldn’t be treated as complacently as it had before. Yet, at the same time, there are limits. And Mr. Bush needs to be reminded of them.

Syriana

2006-01-25T01:18:00.000-05:00

Syriana is, to my mind, an elaborated, over-long doppelgänger of Crash; except this time set in the Middle East and dealing with another nettlesome issue -- Oil. Like Paul Haggis’s Crash, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana is interested in argument over story or narrative. Notwithstanding his function as a screenwriter, Gaghan appears to have used the film as a vehicle to dramatize a number of debates that have been circulating throughout our post-9\11 environment.

First, American dependency on foreign oil has long been the hobbyhorse of well-meaning liberals, and since Syriana was executive produced by EBay founder Jeff Skoll, Hollywood Auteur Steven Soderbergh and his collaborator qua renaissance man George Clooney, the argument is one that has great purchase in the film. The second, more general argument deals with means, or more to the point, the lengths to which American dependency on foreign oil is sustained. These issues and the arguments that surround them can range from the remarkable, to the compelling, to the exhaustingly tedious, to the downright delusive. So where does Gaghan’s offering register on the gamut?

To be fair, the answer would be as long and as convoluted as Syriana, so it would be simpler to describe the mise en scène first. Set in the breath-taking environs of Beirut, George Clooney portrays Bob Barnes, a grizzled CIA case officer who is not unlike Robert Baer, the grizzled CIA case officer and author of See No evil, a book which Syriana, evidently, borrows from. Clooney’s character engages in stealth deals whose transactions involve the sale of United States weaponry to Middle Eastern intermediaries. All of this, unsurprisingly, is entirely under the auspices of the United States government. That is one thread.

Interspersed with this are disparate threads that eventually, hopefully, form some type of semblance. Chris Cooper is the churlish Texan Oil executive, replete with all those impolite southern bon mots. As the Managing Partner of an ethically disinterested law firm, Christopher Plummer renders the single-minded and boundless venality of his ilk brilliantly. Matt Damon the actor plays Matt Damon as an energy trader.

There is an emir, maybe in Beirut, not likely in Tehran -- who knows? -- on the precipice of deciding which one of his sons will become the next emir. One son is a reformer buoyed by a strong sense of obligation and commitment to his country; he hopes to reinvest the country's oil wealth back into the countries pitiable infrastructure. The other son wants to sell his country's oil to the Americans at below market-value; he also isn’t troubled with the idea of American military bases on his soil. Guess who the American favor? Guess who’s going to be the next emir? And still there are other threads, one turning out to be periphery, the other even still more periphery. So much for the narrative. But wither Gaghan’s arguments?

To recapitulate a point, Crash and Syriana are the same movie. Both grab at contrived almost opportunistic scenarios to manipulate, as A.O Scott of the Times says of Crash, dialogue and mood. When Matt Damon trails off into one of those prolix geopolitical diatribes reminiscent of Good Will Hunting, his studied earnestness betrays a false intention. The dialogue feels too much like arguments Gaghan may have had with close friends. Standing in the picturesque deserts of Lebanon turns out to be just an excuse to have these arguments.

On another occasion we look in on a Madrassa, the imam is lecturing to the students about the failure of liberal states, noting that “deregulation”, “privatization”, or “lower taxes” are not cures to the ailments of modernity, saying quiet ominously that Christian theology has utter failed. Do imams really talk like this? To me, this sounds like Gaghan as an imam pontificating to a western audience. But who knows?

We must keep in mind that Gaghan penned Traffic, a better film than Syriana, which also involved intersecting and convoluted narrative threads, except that time dealing with the drug trade. And if oil is the drug which Americans are dependent on, then, like Traffic, Syriana talks of systems beyond the comprehension and control of individual agents. What Syriana does best, then, is to explicate the essences of systems. That the only inertia is self-interest, that the system will always remain static, and that beneath and above the myriad layers of obfuscation there is no logic, only self-interest replacing self-interest.

The crux of Gaghan's argument is that Big Oil and American national interests are synonymous, and that in the pursuit of these interests Middle Eastern governments, perforce, must necessarily reflect United States dicta. The deck is always stacked against contrary outcomes. It's an argument that is difficult to disagree with. All of this begins to sound very glib.

+++

The aesthetic of Syriana is very much like that of Traffic’s. The pacing is languorous, the shots, many on hand-held cameras, capture stunting landscapes and lush vistas, yet the cinematography in general chooses an austere sensibility. For a film of this genre it feels too antiseptic, too insular, too prosaic, and too indistinguishable from Traffic at points. Syriana isn’t a bad film, for the conclusions it attempts to reach are novel, but it’s not necessarily a good one either, since the arguments it disguises as drama are about as credible as they were in Crash.

New Slang

2006-01-24T00:45:00.000-05:00

And the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada: After all the axes are grinded, the knives sharpened, cudgels gathered, and tridents hoisted -- after that final hatchet is dug into Paul Martin’s back by an erstwhile ally, Mr. Martin inevitably relenting and stepping down as the Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff will be chosen as the new Liberal leader.

Mr. Ignatieff, that Harvard intellectual and humanitarian hawk whose support for the Iraq war was convincing enough for this humble writer to bite, prevailed in the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore to win a seat in the House of Commons and a chance at the Liberal leadership. By earlier accounts, Mr. Ignatieff was in tough. The Etobicoke-Lakeshore constituents were generally skeptical of a Liberal parachute candidate who hadn’t lived in Canada in over 40 years. Despite his impeccable and no doubt enviable credentials -- Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy at Harvard, broadcaster, journalist, professor, author of numerous books, novelist, Booker prize nominee, etc. -- people weren’t buying his run for a likely backbench position in a Liberal opposition. Something smacked of opportunism.

It didn’t help that the Liberal machine all but secured his nomination, locking out a local Croatian candidate who had his own designs of succeeding Jean Augustine, a former Liberal stalwart in that riding. And so, predictably, Michael Ignatieff rallies were stormed by jilted Croatians excoriating him for his support of the Iraq war and his alleged Croatian racism. In rebutting these criticisms Ignatieff, a commentator on the Balkan wars and the subsequent dissolution of Yugoslavia, drew the distinction between his misgivings with an aggressive Croatian nationalism and Croatian racism. Mr. Ignatieff wrote thoughtfully on the former while never evincing any evidence of the latter. Many of the attacks on him were both defamatory and without merit.

The Conservative candidate in the race, John Capobianco, couldn’t shake the baggage of working in the backrooms of the disreputable Mike Harris government. The NDP candidate, Liam McHugh-Russell, was an unserious University of Toronto Law student who didn’t even make the effort to prepare for a debate against Michael Ignatieff because, as he says, he didn’t think anyone was showing up. Sure. But in the end Ignatieff out classed them all.

And as I finish up writing this, my man, Paul Martin, has stepped down with dignity and grace – deciding to not run again and therefore leaving the door open for hopeful leadership candidates.

Kobe

2006-01-23T00:58:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching a ridiculous Toronto Raptors’ game on the T.V. Down in La La Land, the Raps looked to grab a second win on their west coast road trip. Initially the Lakers came out flat and altogether uninspired. They were essentially dead in the water by half time down 13 points. “Kobe’s going to get his points” went the refrain; and sure, why not, let him have his 40 points -- just as long as the Raps walk away with the W. And so at one point in the third quarter when the Raps were up by 18, it was easy enough to say “so what if he hits a few jumpers”. But when the 17-foot jumpers turned into 25-foot three pointers, the Raps exchanging twos for Kobe threes, we had entered dangerous territory. At the end of the third Kobe collected 53 points as if the Raptor defenders were lowly J.V.

Earlier today I had joked with my brother at the absurdity and ease with which Kobe put up points. In this calendar he is averaging close to 45 points-a-game; over the last 15 games, I believe, he’s had only one twenty point game, the rest have been 30, 40, and even 50 point outings. And then we wondered whether or not Jordan had ever scored over 70. We checked the records and were surprised to know that he hadn’t (69), and then joked again that Kobe would do it sooner or later considering the season he was having. The irony could not go unnoticed especially and because five minutes into the fourth quarter Kobe had 60 and the game was effectively done -- the Raptors looking passive and impotent. I’m a big Bosh fan, so it was a bit problematic to see him struggle yet at the same time cheer Kobe on. But I did nonetheless. The Raptors, like everyone else enjoying the game, sat back and watched history.

Bryant finished the game with 81 points, the second highest single game point total, behind only Chamberlain’s historic 100. To put things into perspective, something that should embarrass the Raptors, Kobe out scored them 55 to 41 in the second half. Asked about the unenviable task of guarding Kobe Bryant earlier that night, Morris Peterson (Mo-Pete!) reflected thusly: “A player like that is going to get his points.” Clearly Mo-Pete hadn’t imagined anywhere near that many.

Grit-lock

2006-01-18T23:41:00.000-05:00

I’m already partial to that adorable, jowl-cheeked of a Prime Minister Paul Martin, so this may not be saying much, but have you seen the latest Liberal ad? No it’s not a scurrilous hit-piece about how Mr. Harper is indistinguishable from the far-right neoconservative hawks responsible for the Iraq debacle. And it’s markedly less anti-American than the latest spate of artless Liberal ads. The ad begins innocuously enough with Paul Martin side straddling an oak dresser. He’s looking pensive and unhurried, which is a change.

Doubtless a recent ad sprung together in response to criticisms over their glib anti-Americanism, this ad places the Prime Minister front and center admitting a) that Canada’s relationship with the US is valued; b) that the US is our neighbour and not our nation (ed. – I’m looking at you Stephen); and c) that the Liberal government has not been ‘perfect’ – really?. After listing off our country’s peerless values he asks for Canadians to join him on Monday to choose ‘that Canada’: the one that values socially progressive principles like….. Obligatory platitudes here. It looked like he was in a hotel room, between campaign stops, or perhaps just woken from sleep, but altogether he looked ascendant.

Yet it still seems questionable that the Conservative will form a majority government -- baring some unfortunate vote splitting in Quebec and British Columbia in their favor. A third way has become progressively more palatable, and the NDP will likely see the fruits of years and years of labor pains. Mr. Layton should unqualifiedly be commended for this turn around, as well as Mr. Chrétien, incidentally.

And yet it’s still tight in Ontario, the electoral plinth any sitting government rests on. Expect plenty of final week histrionics from all parties; and expect one of the closest federal elections in modern history -- or since the last one

End Game

2006-01-12T14:04:00.000-05:00

It's not like I predicted an impending Conservative swell in my December 13 post -- not in the slightest. I simply noted on how well they had been campaigning up until that point. Trends were fairly suggestive of this Crest, as they should've been. Flat out: the Liberals were being out hustled on every score. It's been a bit pathetic.

As the campaign heads into its final week there appears to be no give in the Conservative's momentum. Paul Martian and the Liberals are, at this point, suffering from a peculiar problem. It's not so much that people are dismayed by allegations of corruption, or that they have simply fatigued at the thought of another Liberal government, it's that the Liberals no longer register. After twelve years in government the Liberals have become government.

The distinction is a fine one. Whereas the Conservatives and NDP can run on the outsider platform that rebukes the sitting government, the Liberals are hamstrung by their inability to offer anything in the ways of a critique, because to do so would invalidate what the Liberals have done for the last twelve years. The Liberals are running on a record that has played too long. (Even if that's been a good thing for Canada on the whole)

Monday's debate, one could say, was an aberration, conforming nothing substantial save for the biases we already brought. Naturally, Paul Martin was flailing his arms affectedly, like the sailor watching the sea swallow his ship. But true to form Martin didn't miss his opportunity to miss an opportunity. When Stephen Harper was being grilled by Duceppe and Layton about the mysterious individuals donating to his campaign, and looking considerably flustered, to the extent that Stephen Harper can look flustered, the moderator offered Martin a piece of HarperÂs flesh, an opportunity to strike. Martin brushed aside the offer with an effete gesture to say, inexplicably,"I would like to talk about the Notwithstanding clause".

The 'Brian-trust' at the Liberal war room sure has its finger on the pulse of the common Canadian. When was the last time you and your friend got into a contentious argument about the Supremacy of the Parliament and the jurisdictional impositions an independent and unelected body places on Provinces through the Charter? Doubtless the chatter around the water cooler the following morning was all about that ignoble clause.

Other highlights in the Debate were Stephen Harper's tightly controlled coif, his incrementally better attempt at conveying humanoid characteristics; Jack Layton's piercing snake charmer's gaze, the effect of which was to project that silent and desperate intensity commonly associated with used Car salesmen -- but he sold it; Giles Duceppe's wildly fluctuating inflections, later settling into that grizzly curmudgeon we grown to disdain and love all at the same time.

And then came the Liberal attack ads, which were baseless, deplorable, and pretty much correct. Spliced with quotes from an erstwhile, politically inept, Stephen Harper, the ads materialize into a direct focus of Harper's suspect and tragically deformed eyes, implicitly asking us whether or not we could trust eyes like this. The short answer is no. But change is a tough thing to stop. I'm crossing my fingers blue for only a Conservative minority, given that the NDP, and ironically the Liberals, will have the balance of power. All bets may be off, though, since it appears that the Conservative's could be heading for a majority. Gulp.

Conservative Crest

2005-12-13T17:57:00.000-05:00

While I’m loath to admit it, even in the face of adroit hustings maneuvering, the Conservative party is running a near flawless campaign. And yet, I must vouch my Liberal allegiances before they are metaphysically revoked. So here goes. Stephen Harper will never earn my trust (his eyes, particularly in those egregious excuses for political ads the Conservatives are running, betray an evil of the worst kind; or there’re just tragically misshapen – ed.) however, the Conservatives have been nothing less than spectacular. OK, I’m being a tad facetious. But altogether, they have been ably up to the task of deliver the goods day in and day out, offering fresh idea after fresh idea.

Apropos, yesterday’s announcement of a $500 tax-credit for families with children under 16 involved in sport and physical activity was just another example of their growing appeal. And to name it a Sports credit? Pure genius! Along with the proposed GST percentage point cut and the income tax shelter for seniors, among others, the Conservatives have not only charmed the message much like a snake charmer but have also managed to stroke some psychological sweetspots that can’t but arouse interest among even the most liberal.

There have, no doubt, been a few hiccups, like Brian Pallister infelicitous gaffe regarding women and their inability to firmly answer questions. When asked to clarify his comments, which weren’t taken out of context primarily because they were delivered in front of a camera to an interviewer, he gave the predictably pat and therefore predictably flimsy response that is characteristically know as a mea culpa – he said he was taken out of context. But the story, your run-of-the-mill ‘Conservatives are out of touch with the mainstream of Canadian social values’, a story so quickly amplified by our ‘Liberal media’s’ journalistic aplomb, had no legs.

The Conservatives, it would appear, are getting a fairer shake this time around, if only because the country is in the throes of an insurgency of lethargy. People are simply tired of hearing anything the Liberals have to say. Anything! It’s the curse of being electorally successful for too long, the point at which returns begin to diminish. Aside from Paul Martin’s intention to ban handguns, which would be momentous if it weren’t so after-the-fact, the Liberal campaign has been a woefully tedious mess.

Communications Director Scott Reid’s fine contempt toward what families would spend their childcare dollars on under a Conservative plan -- beer and popcorn, as he sees it -- was met with the necessary opprobrium from all sides. And for all their public relations acumen, to counter Mr. Reid wry remarks the Liberal's took a descent into gay marriage demagoguery; a tired and unqualifiedly uninspired tactic. It was so incongruous to hear Mr. Martin fulminate about the threat the Conservatives posed to gay marriage. It was so 2000! Isn’t same-sex marriage already the law of the land?

Recent polls have been fairly static, The Liberals still manage to hold a seven to eight point lead over the Conservatives nationally, and in Ontario the Liberals are polling relatively well. But the trends seem to show a gradual warming towards the Conservative message in general, which has meant a virtual bottoming out of NDP support in Ontario. NDP support usually shifts to the Liberals strategically in an attempt to hedge Conservative gains. So now the question can’t help but reveal itself: Wither the Liberals?

* * *

A banishment to the political wilderness may be exactly what liberalism in Canada needs, in my opinion. I’m all for some type of political time-out to allow the Liberals to get their shit together. Or just get a breather at least. As a result of the dearth of ideas, an utter lack of principle, of direction, and, more prominently, of leadership, a programmatic and intellectual refashioning of liberal ideas is badly needed. And though I may be contradicting what I wrote in my last post, which was intended as pure political strategy, Stephen Harper is no more a leader than Paul Martin is. Paul Martin is a leader only because of his experience -- and by default.

A Conservative minority government wouldn’t necessarily be a horrible thing. The de facto Prime Minister Harper would be de jure powerless. In this scenario, the balance of seats in the house would be held by a generally centrist and social democratic rabble of MP’s. The Liberals will have an opportunity to go sit in the corner and think about of what they’ve done to the county.

Message

2005-12-05T18:07:00.000-05:00

The Canadian federal election is fully underway with hardly a step being missed by each political party, both in tone and message. Out of the gates first are the Conservatives, whose consistency and discipline has enabled them to frame the debate thus far.

Stephen Harper and his outfit have done an excellent job getting out message faster than the Liberals. For example, the proposed GST cut is undoubtedly a policy chestnut the Conservatives have been holding on to a for while now, and in the midst of the holiday shopping season functions more as a psychological boost than sound economic policy.

Jack Layton has stuck to the tried and true NDP hobbyhorses, health care, the environment, and education. But his electoral fortunes look to be much worse than if he continued to prop-up the minority Liberal government. Mr. Layton is no longer the most powerful man in Canada.

In the sponsorship scandal’s fallout, Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc are polling strong in Quebec, and no less a character than André Boisclair, the PQ's newly elected leader, makes the prospect of Separatist resurgence very real.

Paul Martin’s Liberals are doing what sitting governments mired in corruption allegations do, staying out of the headlines.

And it’s not exactly hurting them either. In a CPAC-SES poll conducted last night (Random Telephone Survey of1200 Canadians, MoE ± 2.9%, 19 times out of 20) the Liberals have 38% of decided voters’ support, a pick up of 4%, while the Conservatives have 29% of decided voters’ support, a drop off of 1%. This even despite last week’s strong campaigning by the Conservatives. Even more troubling for the Conservatives is the strong polling for Unsure, 20%, for Best PM, surpassing Stephen Harper’s 19%. And when it comes to trust, competence and vision on a Leadership index, it’s not even close: Martin is 30 points ahead of Harper, who seems to be losing ground.

This brings me to what Iwanted to say -- prefaced and couched as it is with the skeletal of bare journalistic requirements. Earlier this morning, Paul Martin gave what I think was a terse and piquant speech that should crystallize the Liberal message for the remainder of this election. His essential point was that leadership matters, or leaders matter – which ever way has more purchase. For all his otherwise charming deficits, Paul Martin projects the characteristics most closely associated with leadership better than Stephen Harper. One simple metric could be who wants the job more. Stephen Harper has always been a reluctant leader, quick to cut himself from party doyens. Paul Martin, on the other hand, has wanted this job since lord knows when. Another metric is international visibility, which Martin wins hands down – this isn’t a fair match for Harper.

So if the Liberals want to do well, I believe, they have to change the scope of their message. Healthcare is a dead metaphor, literally. There is a fatigue and growing malaise anytime the subject to brought up. It’s neither comprehensible as a general election question -- it’s too over wrought -- or palatable for reasonable dialogue. It is the stuff of antiseptic bromides and ridiculous tautologies. (“Fix HealthCare for a Generation”) Leaders, in light of our particular historical situation, matter. When international tumult threatens to damage the already threadbare international order [fill in obligatory analogy] who we elect reflects what we believe. Our Prime Minster must not only lead Canada, but represent Canada to the world. Now here there are obvious undertones of Bush and America’s perception throughout the world. (This tact must be navigated adroitly and great expense must be taken not to directly critique Bush – oblique criticism is permitted) Martin and the Liberals win this way. Liberal Message needs to raise the altitude coming into January.

I felt very strongly about getting this idea to the Liberal party, so much so that I called the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) which is a listed number on the Government of Canada’s website, and asked to speak to David Herle, a Liberal campaign strategist. To my amazement I was put through, or at least I assumed I was. His assistant informed me that he was on the other call and would get back to me when he was free. I was slack-jawed, although still very skeptical. Not to appear of bad repute, even though in their eyes I most certainly am, I left my real name and real number.

It turns out that my call may have been transferred to the PCO (Privy Council Office) which ‘provides public service support to the Prime Minister’, and security no doubt. Why do I think this? Well, it turns out that a recent visitor to my site works at the Privy Council Office and was likely checking the nature and content of my blog; this hardly bothers me – I welcome all eyes.

They justifiably assumed that something was amiss. A man calling the PMO and asking for a Liberal strategist? As if that’s possible. That I could call and be transferred to the Liberal War should be a testament to the accessibility of our country’s political machinery. But that’s too much to ask, and a service no political party should even entertain. Yet, there is something to be said about taking to pulse of the common man. To the PMO and PCO, no harm was intended. To David Herle, give me a call sometime, I have some good ideas.

Indecision

2005-11-03T11:45:00.000-05:00

Dwight Wilmerding is an erstwhile employee of the Pfizer Corporation, having been fired from an ambiguously unsatisfying technical-support job that, come to think of it, was probably going to be outsourced anyhow. Listless, unmoored, and an altogether likeable lay-about, Dwight is the feckless 28-year-old protagonist in Benjamin Kunkel’s first novel Indecision. Kunkel, 32, is one of the founding editors of n+1, a ‘little magazine’ in the mold of a Partisan Review circa. 1940’: a cadre of aspiring New York Intellectuals serious about literature and political and cultural criticism. It should go without saying, then, that Indecision should be a fictional vehicle to push his thus far imbibed political idiosyncrasies, and on a crass level it is. But Indecision turns out to be more+1, philosophic and cleverly comic at length, though evocative and poignant when the narrative permitted.

Our aforementioned hapless narrator suffers from abulia, “Loss or impairment of the ability to make decisions or act independently”, a fittingly postmodern condition which, fittingly enough, has a postmodern biomedical cure, namely the drug Abulinix. So racked with indecision Dwight is that he’s resorted to flipping a coin to determine his actions – yet somehow still ends up feeling ambivalent. The root of this irresolution, it can be gleaned, is Dwight’s overall sense that, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, liberal capitalism seems ineluctably directionless, with no end in sight, or impedance in path, and certainly no morality at its core. All this seems to imply that his particular life is without consequence.

Wryly glomming over what his maybe-possibly-girlfriend Vaneetha has just said, Dwight has resigned himself to being just another cliché:

I knew she was right. It wasn’t very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.

And then there is the mise en scene in which Dwight generally retreats to: New York City, Chambers St., with four other unambitious yet overeducated twenty-somethings cocooned in an atmosphere of eternal adolescence and irresponsibility. They wear their cultivated infantilism like a badge of honor; “Out of everybody we knew our immaturity was best-preserved, we dressed worst and succeeded least professionally.” Kunkel evokes a sentiment that is ubiquitous to this modern condition -- that of the young professional trying to evolve in a culture obsessed with youthfulness. But beyond the Chambers St. windows existed another world Dwight is understandably wary of:

Outside was the streaming traffic, the money bazaar, the trash-distributing winds with their careerist velocities. And here inside Chambers St. was the cozy set of underachievers.

Martin Heidegger show’s up disguised as Otto Knittel, a philosopher whose book Dwight is unhurriedly reading. One of the intuitive aphorisms in Der Gebrauch der Freiheit – or The Uses of Freedom – is “Procrastination is our substitute for immortality” because “we behave as if we have no shortage of time.” And who of us hasn’t felt the tugging in-temporality of procrastination? As such, Kunkel infuses Dwight with a Socratic inquisitiveness that is both witty and naïve. Dwight is never without an ironic turn of phrase and -- though, I suppose, this may have been Kunkel’s aim -- isn’t as guileless as he professes.

When one of Dwight’s roommates, a putative medical student, offers him Abulinix for his indecision, Dwight contains his enthusiasm, since an otherwise decisive yes would disqualify him. But it’s a clinical trial and likely side-effects are bound to be prohibitive to his taking the drug, right? No. Dwight dives in headlong hoping, in the process, to figure out his ‘romantico-sexual’ situation with Vaneetha, his laissez affair, if awkwardly loving, relationship with his recently divorced parents, his eerily incestuous proclivities towards his older sister, and, more chiefly, his uncertain life trajectory.

Dwight’s father, a commodities trader, plays the perfect foil to Dwight’s sister, a leftist inclining anthropologist. His mother being an Episcopalian vegetarian adds a similarly whacky layer to the already comic plot. So, it is finally his mother who sagaciously notes of the city that “you can become more inert than you notice. You can mistake the city’s commotion for your own.”

Dwight has something to chew over.

A fast approaching prep school reunion also inserts an element of urgency into Dwight’s predicament. Impetuously, he decides to fly to Ecuador to visit an old prep school classmate named Natasha, an intelligent, leggy Belgian who is the possessor of great pulchritude. The excursion, moreover, doubles as an excuse to experience the unfettered effects of Abulinix. Dwight then ends up in an Ecuadorian jungle with a native guide and a Belgian Argentine named Brigid who, coincidently, happens to be a doctoral student in anthropology with socialist leanings.

All this leads to an historical primer on the social externalities of Neo-imperialist aspirations and what, as a consequence, they excrete on benighted third world denizens. Little -- though admittedly just enough -- is said about the pervading emptiness of modern society’s secular materialism; the inaudibly incessant hum of purportedly time-saving technology, enveloping any meaningful sense of identity. Little is said of this because, I think, Kunkel was attempting to convey an astutely counterintuitive argument regarding something else.

First, concerning our choices and their concomitant freedoms, Kunkel’s protagonist says:

But my tastes, my interests, my relationships and beliefs are all really mediocre and typical… And so as of today what I’ve decided with utter decisiveness is just to resign my self to mediocrity and being totally clichéd.

Therefore, to embrace mediocrity, to resigns ones life to low expectations, is to accept life for what it is, contingency, absurdity, irrelevance. Since Dwight believes “it’s going to be ugly if at forty-two there’s still this like holy grail I’m hoping to trip over.” Here Kunkel renders, realistically, the common realization that one must pack-up his hopes and dreams and submit to the imperatives of the ‘real’-world. Dwight goes on to joke that a career as motivational speaker on the topic of mediocrity would be the next logical extension. Imagining himself at a lectern, Dwight admonishes thusly:

Our life sucks only because we wish it didn’t meanwhile we morally betray the world’s laboring and unemployed poor people in the nation of Ecuador and elsewhere by our failure to enjoy the fruits and nuts of our privileged consumer lifestyle. We have to be happy with this arrangement, so that some one can be.

Understandably, this sounds grim worldview. Yet Kunkel is coming another-way-round to make his argument. The trek in the Jungle, the primer in political economy, the chemical effects of Abulinix and other hallucinogenic miscellany, contribute to Dwight’s awareness of his choices and their concomitant freedoms. Just as he is free to choose the beige, existentially barren conveyor-belt to a consequence-free modernity, he is likewise free to choose a thankless and peripatetic existence of little to no remuneration fighting the Neoliberal hegemony. But exactly how Kunkel arrives to this conclusion is less persuasive than one would hope, and even less convincing than Kunkel himself lets on.

The deus ex machina, an Edenic folic in tropical bucolic with an ersatz Eve and apple, substituted for with a tomate de arbol, strains credulity when Dwight, with chemical-induced alacrity, signs up to serve in the fight for Global Justice. Where it not so swift and incongruous, Dwight’s decision could have at least been compelling.

Although, to be fair, Kunkel paints with broad strokes competently, and is even able to deliver a pointillist’s accuracy with impressionistic accounts. For example, even though I’m not clearly sold on Dwight’s conversion, this passage seems apt:

I had the other tomate de arbol in my hand. Gently I started peeling it. “Ah fuck, how will we ever be happy again, Brigid? I was afraid of this happening.” I sliced the skin off the fruit in red-yellow-green scabs. But this was only on autopilot and beneath or through the careless actions of my hands I was looking at something else. It was like flying over water and then when you looked down the ocean the skim of mirror was yanked off, so that the water became transparent, and there the sea was filled with what you knew had always been there: the rubbery gardens and drowned mountains, the creatures from plankton up to nekton, the swimming bodies and the unburied skeletons, and now you—or I—I saw it all at once. And so in the fucked-up San Pedrified way the entire world system of Neoliberal capitalism disclosed itself to me, and I felt somewhat grim.

Dwight, meanwhile, becomes an endearing and charming character with a singularly unique voice.

Despite finding it clumsy and misshapen to begin with, Indecision turned out to be a terrifically appealing read as it worn on. Dwight’s innocence and charisma are undeniable, and the structure of the novel integrates his relative progress adeptly. Kunkel’s prose, equal parts circuitous erudition and Hemmingwayesque succinctness, begins somewhat flat and too-pleased with its own cleverness, while eventually cresting to a terse, cause-and-effect essentialism that allows this type of crafty precocity not to dwarf the narrator. At times, Kunkel was in danger of breaching that Chinese Wall between the reader and himself. Dwight is rightly permitted these breaches but the author isn’t.

Altogether, Kunkel’s bildungsroman introduces the reader to an intriguing and not easily forgettable character in Dwight, a character trying and failing to make his decisions matter to the world, when, in the end, they should matter to him.

Art and the Critic: Part 2

2005-11-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

It should only make sense, then, to anticipate the coming push-back against the preponderance of adulation the Canadian indie-scene has been the object of lately. As groups like Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, Dears, Stars, Metric, The Stills, Tegan and Sara (just to name a tendentious few) are lauded over, saturation of the all things indie-Canadiana will likely wake mordant detractors from their dogmatic slumber. Moreover, the general truncation of necessary criticism and the ascendancy of less than talented, but more efficiently marketed, apparatchiks won’t help matters.

Yet this outcome is to be expected. Industry has historically been canny at co-opting and digesting the Nouvelle Vague. However, those with better taste cannot be seen to enjoy what, all of a sudden, becomes universally accepted. Public sentiment therefore acts as a type of irrelevance barometer from which the critic can gauge and then, from this analysis, take leave from the banality of groupthink. A critic, thus, finds his niche in the oppositional judgments of what standards of taste currently prevail, or failing those, which should. The piquant irony is that the critic is most often the one who helped expound prevailing orthodoxies of taste. This ambivalence betrays a disjunction.

In some top-self publications this disjunction has shown itself. Writing in Stylus, an online publication of music and film criticism, Ian Mathers has a few curt things to say about indie music, even mentioning some bands of Canadian extraction:

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with indie music, and if that’s all you listen to then yes, this or the Arcade Fire probably sounds as catchy as all get out – but to the average person out there who doesn’t (for example) read Stylus, this still sounds like every other hotly tipped mess that most people don’t like, not because we privileged few have “better” “taste” or something equally smug, but just because most people are bored by this sort of music. It is not a badge of superiority or mark of inferiority to feel differently. But it would certainly be easier for others to tolerate if this was actually any good.

One has to concede that indie-rock tends to be an incestuous claque of the cognizant; Mathers’s point should be taken. I’m not convinced, however, that ‘most people are bored by this sort of music’ or that it’s less tolerable because it’s not good. (Broken Social Scene is selling to exactly the type of people it shouldn’t be selling to)

Mathers’s concern arises out of a reprisal of You Forgot it in People (YFIIP), which he likens to someone unwittingly receiving a golden shower and being told it was rain; and which placed 7th on Stlyus’s own top 50 of 2000-2005. So maybe he just disagrees with his colleagues’ taste, and that’s reasonable; but then in the reader-response section Mathers goes on to say,

I'm a strong believer in the idea that if you love an album, nothing anyone says should (or can) count against that. I also think a fair number of the people who hyped this record don't fall into that category, though, and that genuine love for the whole thing is a little thinner on the ground than some would claim.

Which would be true had we the empirical evidence. Mathers, then, is not only questioning the psychological motives of those who may be strong believers of YFIIP, he’s also throwing into doubt Stylus’s methodology or, more importantly, credibility in making Best-of lists altogether. What stock should we place in Stylus if their seventh significant album (out of a list of fifty) of the last five years has ‘thin’ support on the ground?

And this may be the case. Mathers may be right. But the weight of evidence supports a contrary conclusion: That Mathers just doesn’t like YFIIP while nearly everyone else at his publication does.

Indeed there is nothing wrong with Mathers distaste for Broken Social Scene’s aesthetic meandering, or his sentiment that ‘most people are bored by this sort of music’. Mathers criticism, although, seems to want to have it both ways. So the right brain is hearing it and saying it ‘still sounds like every other hotly tipped mess’, but the left brain is saying its ‘aimless’and ‘structurally it’s a mess’ and ‘aimless’. Ultimately, Mathers’s right brain should be listening to what his left brain is interpreting -- and vice versa -- that way they’d both be sated. What is aimless and structurally a mess to the left brain is novel and remarkable to the right brain, and what is ‘like every other hotly tipped mess’ to the right brain would please the autocracy and desire for familiarity of the left brain. (This metaphor has been unduly stretched)

Insofar as Mathers is exasperated by Broken Social Scene stylistic muddle, he is equally, if not more so, exasperated by the encomiums heaped on YFIIP. Here -- channeling Thalia, our muse of sarcasm -- is Mathers on this score:

This is it? This is the great revolution? This is what topped the critics’ charts, inspired a million rapturous articles and blog posts and personal testimonies? This? This rancid stew of sour indie self-regard, the disingenuous assurance that no, now we’re making pop music (so for once it’ll be good, lol)

It is fairly clear that Mathers’s distaste for Broken Social Scene is in part related to the genuflecting praise they receive. But why should it be any other way?

If reviews come out nem con in the favor of a particular artist and, subsequently, this results in that artist’s ascension, questions of relevance logically reveal themselves. The critic now has a chance to pours scorn on the artist and, inexplicably, the audience, who end up playing useful idiots. Why should this be so?

Well, this phenomenon speaks to the rational fear of the covetous and insular critic – who, at times, is indistinguishable from a booster. (Wink) Once underground music becomes accessible to the mass culture it is somehow seen as losing its aura, pace Walter Benjamin. The mechanical reproduction of it, and its social visibility, the critic argues, degrades its authenticity. This, of course, is entirely independent of the actual creative enterprise of plying ones trade as an artist; they, no doubt, have their own demons to wrestle with. But what is essential to understand is that, in effect, the critic is saying ‘because music I, at one point, thought was culturally significant is being listened to by the lower-brow and obtusely appreciative, the music now offends my sensibilities’.

This is in fact what the critic is saying -- something we’ve all said one time or another out of covetousness for a particular cultural objet d'art only a few of our close friends were astute or privileged enough to know about first. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t bask in my cognizance when I listened to Feel Good Lost, assured that I was in the Know (with infinitesimal pockets of others) months and years before anyone else -- people I gladly turned my nose to. And yes, there was a usurped pang in my chest when someone brought up the fact that they were already listening to Broken Social Scene two months before I was -- and then there was the contained shock when they said they no longer listened to them; likely as a result of my listening to them.

So this pantomime of sophistication, that my art is better and more avant-garde than yours, is nothing if not predictable. But the assertion that just because something is popular it therefore lacks relevance is wrongheaded. (Notwithstanding democratic elections in countries saddled with dictatorships) If so, nearly all classical music, from Renaissance to Baroque to the Romantics to Contemporary Avant Garde, would have no cultural value. Bartok, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Schoenberg especially, are still relevant today -- although in markedly different ways.

And yet the detractors do make sound arguments. That popularity may be its own justification, that prefabrication and mass distribution deracinates the DIY ethic of music in general and indie rock specifically, and that loss of artistic autonomy takes away something authentic in the process are all arguments that have found no easy response. Yet at the same time these arguments raise questions that are structural and indissoluble within the context of art and commerce.

Should artists live in penury to remain authentic? Why can’t being accessible mean something more than just selling-out? Is authorial sincerity in popular art always required, or even detectable? These are all difficult questions to interrogate. But each day the artist, the critic, and the audience are doing the calculus and responding with their actions. These questions are also eternal challenges that won’t be brought to any finality, and shouldn’t hoped to be, otherwise the whole enterprise of art would lapse into solipsism. We can see the forest for the trees or we can just see the trees. I’m a big fan of the forest -- and the trees.

Broken Social Scene: Part 1

2005-10-30T00:14:00.000-04:00

If your ecumenical tent encompasses the likes of Metric’s Emily Haines and James Shaw, Evan Cranley and Amy Millan of the Stars, and Leslie Feist of Let it Die fame, among others, then the company you keep and the music you create has to be thoroughly layered and unflinchingly collaborative. This is to say nothing of the music’s originality. So, as it happens, there is such a thing, and said music is put together by the Toronto collective-cum-network of indie rockers dubed Broken Social Scene -- who manage to allay our fears about the psychological pathologies of communes. The Utopia hasn’t yet faltered. Since they’re a diverse outfit, they have the flexibility to pursue side projects while still maintaining the ethos of Broken Social Scene the idea. (It doesn't hurt that most of these side projects are in some way affliated with Arts and Crafts records, a boutique label created by the band's doyen, Kevin Drew.)

And this idea has been received with near universal praise. (Fawning reviews in all the major trade publications, the 2003 Juno for Best Alternative album, etc.) Taken literally, the group is a pastiche of each individual’s particular aesthetic bent -- Metric’s tightly shorn arrangements and acerbic lyricism; the lush yet literate extravagance of Stars; and (not a comprehensive list) Leslie Feist and Jason Collett’s soul and sincerity and earnest. (And yet the list goes on.) The ‘supergroup’ -- as they’ve been flatteringly referred to; as if this write up weren’t itself obsequious -- took its initial material form in 1997, fronted by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning. It was only in about 2002 that I was caught up to speed on Feel Good Lost(2001) and You Forgot it in People(2003), which were both phenomenal if not epiphenomenal and subsequently seared into my indispensable hippocampus.

All this is just to say that I picked up Broken Social Scene’s eponymous new LP. To begin with, the art that adorns the cd’s packaging cover is a winsomely contrived cityscape back-dropped by a vermillion, almost fiery, sky. A three section fold-out stores two disc; the main disc and a bonus (i.e. limited edition) disc featuring songs equally up to rigor to appear on the first. The booklet, like the casing, is similarly artful, with the faux-jejune scribblings of a ten-year old boy and the epigrammatic tags of the unabashedly guileless -- for instance, the wry declaration “We hate your hate” can be read on the inside jacket. Though now we should turn to the music, lest this devolve into a tedious account of the all particulars.

The current LP is in many ways, both stylistically and tonally (atonally as well) akin to Feel Good Lost, mostly instrumental and atmospheric in tone. Case in point is the track ‘Feel Good Lost Reprise’ on the bonus cd. But where it departs from Feel Good Lost, it collides with You Forgot it in People (YFIIP) in its reflexive meandering. The acoustics, horns and base line -- as well as tambourines -- that open ‘Our faces split the coast in half’ harkens back to ‘Pacific Theme’ off YFIIP, albeit in a less sleepy and more enthused way. In plosive restraint, Feist’s fixed vocals turn out to punctuate a palimpsest of a song -- that may or may not feature the aural yawn of a cello. Feist’s lilting accompaniments are once again prominent in ‘7/4 (shoreline)’ as Brendan and Kevin et al. warm over the track with endearing falsettos. Lead guitars duel with frenetic drums while late arriving horns portend an impending collapse.

The rest album is an untidy and unstudied mash of experientialism, a bric-a-brac of orchestral cacophony; ponderously frustrating, but not too much so, yet axiomatic and ephemeral at once. The sound is decidedly arty and pop and abides to a sensibility producer Dave Newfeld also brought to YFIIP. Newfeld has show peerless technical proficiency in making blunt, disparate parts reflect light while intergrating recondite instrumentals and melodies into serviceable coherence. It's a creative match with serious fecundity.

‘Superconnected’, with its distorted and majestic keys and angst-laden, bleating vocals, ‘Hotel’, a clavicle jutting trip with nascent pretensions of Synth and Soul, and ‘It’s all gonna break’, a conventional though extend (as in nine minutes) indie-rock narrative that may be trying to say something, count as other notable mentions on this canonical opus.

The ironically titled ‘Major label debut’ is by leap and bounds my favorite of the whole lot. And that is no small feat. It begins ethereally enough with deliberately strummed acoustic guitars (and possibly a harpsichord) foreground by a paradoxically soft snare drum and heavy bass drums that mimic heartbeats but don’t overwhelm the ambience. Kevin Drew’s voice emerges -- along with the sliding atonal shiver of the cymbal -- filled with the insouciance of an autumnal night still kind enough to permit Bermudas. It’s positively weightless. An incantatory tone is struck: ‘I’m just coming here to come down / I can be here / and I can move town / Put my suits onto the guest lists / summer passport became weightless.’ Then the expletive chorus ‘I’m all fucked up’ is reverentially, and all-too-hypnotically, sung as the drums pick-up in a mannered and incremental cadence, the strings dovetailing into a fitting denouement. (Actually, the chorus could be as benign as "I'm all hooked-up"but it's too inaudible to tell, and beside the point anyway.)

The song, pastoral and unambitious, is the high-art equivalent of an early Matisse: not exactly challenging, but thoughtfully and artistically scrupulous with due respect to color, space, mood, and intellect. And this, I think, can describe one of Broken Social Scene’s aesthetic virtues. The other, of course, is the primary unintelligibility of some of their work, as if challenging the listener to engage the morass. Unfortunately this does lead to frustration and is even liable to alienate the listener. Though like any challenging piece of art, the pleasure is in accessing the implicit emotive aspect of the work, thus framing it with the coherence you see fit. Each song offers something new on each successive hearing.

Having moved from the more melancholic and aimless pessimism of Feel Good Lost, and keenly incorporating the technique of chaotic polish from YFIIP, their third album -- despite not being as virtuosic-ally competent as YFIIP -- places itself well in the Broken Social Scene oeuvre.

But critical praise always brings along her ugly, fraternal twin. When critics hoist artists onto a vaunted pedestal, it is usually them who double back and commit a punitive revisionism.

The State of the Nation

2005-09-23T23:10:00.000-04:00

If one was so inclined -- and there are many that are -- one would get the impression that God is exercising a bit of his wrath. And he doesn’t seem to be letting up. Scoff if you must at Revelations, at End of Days and Armageddon, at the Second Coming or the four horsemen of the apocalypse, a cynic can’t deny the inherent eeriness of this past summer.

The city of Toronto officially acquired the all-too-realistic nickname Smoke City, literally becoming an emissions and carbon monoxide swelter. Gas prices -- or where to begin with gas prices! -- have defied comprehension while supply, instead of diminishing, has increased marginally. How to explain this discrepancy has everything to do with the psychological motive of fear—or more clearly, speculative fear. All summer long investors have been afraid of Iraq, of reforms in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Lebanon and how hegemony over oil is diminishing.

Similarly, investors have been afraid of China and Indian, both evolving economies that will soon eclipse the U.S economy. And somehow dollar-per-barrel became the demotic tongue of all. $30 dpb sometime in 2004, it was ridiculous to think, when they joked, that oil would reach $50 dpb. When it reached $70 dpb and looked as though it wasn’t planning on moving much, either up or down, the grousing and the bristling was no longer inaudible. Welcome to the Information Age, truly.

The Markets have learned to ‘price-in’ anticipated imbalances, and have subsequently begun operating on ‘attitudes’ and sentiments. A sentence from a Federal Reserve press release is parsed exegetically and the Markets move. A storm report from the The National Hurricane Center is issued and the Markets move. We are so awash with technical information, often times contradictory and conflicting, that we’ve settled into a catatonic paralysis. The risk premium, which is necessarily a portent for scarcity, or worse, collapse, has priced-up the one commodity that is sine non qua to the world economy: Oil.

It turns out that fear isn’t only a serviceable tactic in terrorism or electoral politics but also profit-taking. As cringe-worthy as arguments for nationalization of vital oil resources are, the notion has once again become far more appealing than the current scenario. Rita will wreck its havoc and the United States will be writing another $200 billion dollar cheque – on top of the $200 billion for Katrina and the $200 billion for Iraq; which isn’t even to speak of billions for Medicaid/Medicare. And although this financing is long-term, the horizon is closing in fast and liabilities are mounting. I pray for the U.S economy; if only for the fate of the Canadian economy.

The History of Love

2005-09-15T21:59:00.000-04:00

Leo Grusky’s eccentricities are those of a warped personality, at peace with silence and loneliness as he is with old age and what it has done to his body. Leo Grusky is also a tragic soul -- bereft of the friends from his idyllic childhood, the family of his native town, and the woman he will love forever.

In 1938, as the Germans roll through Poland, Leo is forced into hiding, assured by his parents that they will return for him. When it is obvious that they will not, that they have died at the hands of the Nazis, Leo flees to America in search of his sweetheart Alma Meremenski -- who has also been driven to seek refuge in America. But when he arrives, Alma -- who thought he’d perished in Poland -- is set to marry another man.

This narrative buttresses the general premise from which the rest of the novel evolves in Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. Since Leo is unable to marry Alma, and, similarly, never to reveal to anyone that he is the father of their child together, he settles into an unremarkable existence, shuttling from his job as a locksmith to his lonely apartment where he writes, intermittently. That Alma would be unwilling to marry her lost sweetheart and that Leo would have to spend the rest of his life both alone and denied of his son are fairly weighty assumptions for this novel to rest on. And I don’t entirely buy them.

Yet Krauss once again does an excellent job creating a lithe yet deep edifice in which her characters can develop. Her first novel, A Man Walks Into a Room, was substantial while perpetrating all the sins of a vacuum. (Though, that was essentially the point; having lost his memory, the reader was tasked to fill in the blanks for Samson Greene.) The History of Love, however, asks the reader for too much credulity.

Leo Gursky has written a book with the eponymous title of the novel regarding the story of his and Alma’s love. Before leaving Slonim, Poland, Leo places The History of Love in an envelope and gives it to his friend Zvi Litvinoff for safe keeping. When the baleful aspirations of the Nazis become apparent, Zvi leaves for Chile, with envelop in-hand, to stay with a cousin. In the ensuing years, resigned to the fact that his friend Leo Gursky has mostly likely died, Zvi, encouraged mainly by his wife, publishes The History of Love under his name. The History of Love is an historical artifact that enmeshes another character in the novel, Alma Singer, whose father names her after the main character.

Alma is curious to find out, after her father dies, the significance of this novel, and whether the Alma Meremenski in the novel is real. I can’t say that I enjoyed this novel more than A Man Walks Into a Room, but it does have a charm -- Leo Gursky particularly.

While not necessarily imbuing an overly heart-rending wistfulness in him, Krauss deftly conveys Leo’s empathic qualities -- his thoughtfulness, his warmth, and his asceticism. There were also passages where Leo was unqualifiedly funny; but unfortunately there weren’t nearly enough. Krauss has a wry, almost counterintuitive way with prose and parody that is refreshingly trenchant. Take for instance this excerpt, where a woman has called to ask if Leo is interested in an Art project:

What kind of project? I asked. She said all I had to do was sit naked on a metal stool in the middle of the room and then, if I felt like it, which she was hoping I would, dip my body into a vat of kosher cow’s blood and roll on the large white sheet of paper provided.

I may be a fool but I’m not desperate. There’s only so far I’m willing to go, so I thanked her very much for the offer but said I was going to have to turn it down since I was already scheduled to sit on my thumb and rotate in accordance with the movements of the earth around the sun.

Passages like these are indispensable to the novel's wit. I’m hoping that her next project will be unreservedly ironic. But Krauss is as much in her skin with comedy as she is with fraught, pithy poetics. She is not cynical about love, and it shows in her relentlessly maudlin style -- which is to countervailing effect when the deluge exacts from the reader all that is left of romanticism and empathy.

Aestheics

2005-08-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

Rosemary, Heaven restores you in life:The inviting yet sinister baseline that opens Evil -- a track off Interpol’s 2004 sophomore LP Antics -- is too mesmerizing by half. The rest of the LP, which I think is solid, was greeted with tepid reviews. Surely they weren’t listening to the same album I was listening to. But yeah, good stuff! Turn on the Bright Lights, their 2002 offering, was clearly much stronger; tracks like Untitled, NYC, PDA, etc., have eerie parallels to Joy Division – an English post-punk band I’ve warmed to. Though, I can’t really see anything wrong with the aesthetics of Antics. The wan linearity of mood, an exercise in restrained impressionism, pervades through the album. Many would say it’s a recapitulation of TOTBL; and it generally is. But TOTBL was great, ergo: Antics > TOTBL? Same as?

Moving right along. At the Bodega down the way, purchasing miscellany, I was be-stilled of heart by a thoroughly indiesque Korean clerk -- likely holdin' it down while paterfamilias transacted business elsewhere. She seemed at ease with what can be ineptly described as an unguarded and unpretentious charm. I commented on her shirt since it appeared no other avenues for superfluous blather were viable, without sounding creepy or invasive of course. The shirt, black, up-against the body, fitting the way it should on a girl like her, was unremarkable, the illegible silkscreen graphics altogether uninspiring. It was only an afterthought to even actually look at the shirt, so consumed was I in fixing her a mawkish gaze. (You have to know I’m exaggerating.)

Anyway, the point is that the response to the shirt question was more interesting than the shirt itself. “The Weakerthans” she says, while continuing to catch me up to speed. Apparently they aren’t that bad. Remember Propagandhi, the Winnipeg punk outfit trafficking in agitprop par excellence? Well, The Weakerthans is Propagandhi member John K. Samson’s new (other?) gig. Presently, I’m enjoying Summer Rain and Benediction. I left to quickly and awkwardly to know whether or not said girl was feeling me, although in my experience it’s very likely that she was. (Zing!) Groups I’m enjoying: (Also) see Red House Painters, soul rending stuff.

The Twenty-Seventh-City

2005-07-30T22:32:00.000-04:00

The city of St. Louis, during a bizarre autumn sometime in the waning years of the 1980’s, selects S. Jammu, a Los Angles born Indian -- formally the Police commissioner of Bombay, Indian -- to succeed the city’s former police chief. The development, needless to say, is unexpected. Jammu hasn’t lived in the United States in over a decade, and that she is a woman doesn’t help matters. Unsurprisingly, the political and business community are skeptical -- the county’s benevolent advisory board, Municipal Growth, especially. And then things begin to change.

Where Jammu was once perceived as an inexperienced and inappropriate choice, she becomes a fount of civic adulations and a symbol for the New St. Louis. Members of Municipal Growth conveniently start revising their opinions of Jammu as, inexplicitly, incidences of bombings and terror related attacks are directed at either them or citizens of the city. It would only seem plausible to draw the necessary connections between Jammu’s arrival on the scene and the oddity of St. Louis being targeted by terrorists, or Indians (that is: Native Americans; an erstwhile, non-extant tribe that miraculously reassembles to terrorize the city and county of St. Louis for past pre-colonial grievances.)

No one but General Norris, a member of Municipal Growth and an unreconstructed character, smells a conspiracy afoot, implausible as this may seem. But this is with good reason: Jammu has managed to extort and blackmail nearly every prominent business and civic leader in St. Louis, amassing the necessary political and logistical power to execute her plan -- to create a real-estate appreciation in downtown St. Louis, an area, not too uncoincidentally, her mother has just recently invested considerable capital in. Nevertheless, Jammu has one final obstacle in Martin Probst, a respected contractor, a paragon of morality, and chairman of Municipal Growth.

And so begins The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s ambitious if somewhat circuitous first novel. The plot is dense, populated by a litany of characters with oscillating motives. Of the narratives, and there are many, Martin Probst’s is of primary import. Probst is best know for being the man who built the Arch, so naturally the mantel of probity rests on him while Jammu attempts, indefatigably, to break him, thus assuring her plan’s success. The campaign she wages would surely be without scruples if undertaken by any ordinary person; it is therefore that much worse that the police chief of St. Louis is behind it.

Yet Jammu isn’t your ordinary person -- or pol or public official, for that matter. She is a hardened politically militant socialist of Trotskyite bent. She is also a protégé of Indira Gandhi, a person to whom she owes much for her professional advancement in Bombay. Though, there is a strain of aimless malice in Jammu which strikes me as vapid. It is amazing how Franzen is able to masterly construct this gargantuan plot yet also skimp on his characters’ consciousness. This is particularly the case with Jammu, who is rarely, if only partially, psychologized to the extent of illumination. Insofar as she maintains a shadowy mystic to the characters in Franzen’s novel, she remains almost entirely ineffable to the reader.

Martin Probst, similarly, is fleshed out rather feebly. We understand that moral rectitude is his métier and “accomplishing things” drives him, but beyond that his rigidity and opacity become stifling—his asceticism literally frustrates the reader. Even when General Norris approaches Probst with the voluminous evidence of The Conspiracy and Jammu’s unsavory involvement in it, Martin chides the General for his outlandishness. What Franzen, in my opinion, seems to be saying of conspiracy theories -- possibly his novelistic conceit -- is that they are for ‘weaker minds.’ He says this while having elaborated on a baroque novel of conspiracy. Is this not frustrating? Was this his intention? What begins to happen to Probst, while tragic, could be construed as cathartic -- for the reader, me specifically. Martin reminds me too much of Alfred Lambert from The Corrections, a character he anticipates.

But Franzen is adept when he’s waxing political.There are overtones of Cold War critique and, as the thought strikes me now, nearly everyone is afflicted with the symptoms of a cold. This was a peculiar meme that I had first attributed to merely banal symbolism; but on further analysis it seems clear that Jammu, a committed marxist qua terrorist, represents an ideological infection, and her efforts at fomenting real-estate speculation are directed towards undermining (indulge me) the arbitrary logic of capitalism -- even if it’s only in St. Louis.

However, my understanding of this is still very shallow since, it seems, Franzen is all over the place. If it is anything, The Twenty-Seventh City is an astute commentary on the local and the political. That a small group of political and financially influential citizens can steer the course of a city, thus determining its fate, is not a new argument. Franzen, instead, offers something polemical:

Threatened with the prospect of thinking and deciding, the body politic had surrendered. It embarrassed the commentators -- but only because they failed to place the election within the larger context. Their shame was a measure of their obsolescence. They did not understand that America was outgrowing the age of action. (503)

Here, Franzen is speaking of the media trying to understand lower voter turn out in a St. Louis referendum -- this is in 1988. Franzen is anticipating the mainstream media’s ‘obsolescence’. Voter apathy was nascent but growing after Nixon and more prominent during the Carter administration. The obsolescence of the media was just around the corner. And now the electorate is mature in its apathy.

In the end, The Twenty-Seventh City is a feat, considering that Franzen was only 28 when the novel was published. A strong novel that is beguiling at turns and cast in the mold of epic grander than reality, it augured great things for Franzen. (As evidenced in The Corrections and Strong Motion (soon to be read)) Unfortunately, for me at least, it was also bloated; so heavy was its narrative enterprise that it began to sag at its edges, nearly making its conclusion indecipherable and, retrospectively, its beginnings fugitive.

His head is flat.

2005-07-27T22:26:00.000-04:00

In one paragraph a New York Review of Books essay offers a stinging rebuttal to the Panglossian polemics on globalization's behalf. Once again, Thomas Friedman -- with a mustache that assures him eternal allegiance with snake-oil salesman everywhere -- turns out looking silly. John Gray opines thusly:

Globalization has no inherent tendency to promote the free market or liberal democracy. Neither does it augur an end to nationalism or great-power rivalries. Describing a long conversation with the CEO of a small Indian game company in Bangalore, Friedman recounts the entrepreneur concluding: "India is going to be a superpower and we are going to rule." Friedman replies: "Rule whom?" Friedman's response suggests that the present phase of globalization is tending to make imbalances of power between states irrelevant. In fact what it is doing is creating new great powers, and this is one of the reasons it has been embraced in China and India.

A Man Walks Into a Room

2005-07-22T00:31:00.000-04:00

Nicole Krauss’s first novel A Man Walks Into a Room is a beautiful, poetic, lilt that is at once endearing and intellectual. Samson Greene is found wandering the Nevada desert, unknowing and unknown to authorities. Initially, law enforcement officers are doubtful if the identification that bears Samson’s name is, in fact, actually his; but it is soon confirmed that the Samson Greene aimlessly walking the Nevada desert is Samson Greene -- resident of New York, professor of English at Columbia.

To the surprise of a neurosurgeon and, later, his wife, Anna, it turns out that a tumor the size of a cherry has wiped out Samson’s entire memory – well not exactly. Samson will remember nothing of the past twenty-four years of his life once the tumor is removed; not his job, not his friends, and not, more tragically, Anna.

Recalling only the first twelve years of his life, Samson enters his new reality with timidity and awe. The geopolitical tête - à – tête that was the Cold War is over; an older and more intoxicated Billy Joel appears puzzling to him; modern technology like the computer, to say nothing of the internet, is altogether incomprehensible; and when he finds out that his mother has already passed away, five years prior, the pain is too much to bear. And in the interim, while he recovers, reconnecting with his friends and colleagues proves awkward and stifling, further exacerbating the swell of alienation and loneliness he’s already undergoing.

So what of Anna? In these exchanges Krauss deploys the language of restrained expectance. Anna is torn – wanting to, on the one hand, sooth and finesse, slowly, the lost memories to the surface, or, alternatively, shake, cajole and pull from Samson the experiences they shared together, experiences that are as much a part of his identity as hers. But Samson’s condition is irrevocable; and, inevitably, Anna and Samson drift apart. There is a culpability Samson feels, and as Anna begins to lose hope, he too loses rasion-d’etre, wandering into an ineffable anomie.

The novel follows Samson back to Nevada as he embarks on an experimental project that is touted to advance science and society, and then next to the center of his material mind where he is confronted with tough questions. Why this? What now? The journey is gut-wrenching and at times almost meaningless, but in the end it is cathartic.

I found Krauss’s prose fluid, and though initially the structure, even the narrative, seemed illegible, the second half of the novel was paced well, with the requisite amount of suspense. There were a star-lode of ideas that, in and of themselves, could buttress an entirely different novel. Ideas like the authenticity of memory, the psychology of the individual in relation to habits and memory, the cognitive structure of personalities as regards memory. (I may be repeating myself with the last clause, but oh well.)

I highly recommend the book. During the past month I’ve also read Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, which I’ll attempt to a mini-review of, and on the recommendation of my mother I’ve also read Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch.

US environs

2005-07-21T18:23:00.000-04:00

Ambitions are low. I’ve been derelict from duty for the past two weeks for two very good reasons: a) Visiting family in Connecticut, and b) catching up with friends in Toronto. To say the very least, the time away was constructive -- and calming. The day I arrived in Hartford was the day of the London Bombings and, naturally, security was tight. My sister recalls hearing F-14 fighter jets flying over-head as she came to pick me up from the train station; and surrounding the station were numerous members of the US law enforcement apparatus, bomb-sniffing dogs, first responders, and, possibly, characters in radiological suits. (Though, this may have just been a peculiarly dressed individual.)

Somehow the overall mood seemed to be tepid, as though absolutely no threat existed, even though the transit systems are likely the most porous and vulnerable when it comes to point of weakness -- but nevertheless.

Connecticut is a breath-taking vision of pastoral with its Classical, Colonial and Victorian architecture, expansive and florid green-spaces, and historical landmarks. I had the opportunity to pass by Mark Twain’s Manor. And interestingly enough, I passed through the Berkshires, a prominent local in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, a novel that I’m currently reading.

There were, of course, no shortage of American flags; and the national pastime, contrary to popular falsehoods, is not baseball but shopping. I truly believe that ‘Hearts and Minds’ could easily be won over if detractors of all things Americana were sent through the extravagance of a shopping mall. Shopping is good -- but good for a reason. I now understand why Americans are the most productive people in the world -- their stores, it seems, never close. Consumption is a socializing and collectivizing force, first, and a patriotic refrain, second. The sales tax kicks in only after a certain amount, making many of my purchases incredibly economical.

But then there is the inequality. Almost as stark as it is in Washington, Connecticut could move quickly from uber-affluence to desolate squalor. It’s only a two minute drive from the Governor’s Mansion to crack-houses and car-jackings. This is the Two Americas that John Edwards so breathlessly and eloquently speaks of.

And yet, what struck me as constituting the underlying ethos of America was its entrepreneurial verve. Literally everyone is trying to make a dollar -- trying to attain that upward mobility so embodied in the American dream. The pitiful thing that stuck with me is how unquestionably popular Bush is when it comes to the economic argument. The 'Ownership Society' rhetoric has been appealing to the middle class, pinched on both sides by the vast entitlement tax-encroachment and the tax-avoiding, tax-sheltering, tax-haven plutocrats. But Bush’s 'Ownership Society' rhetoric is just that: rhetoric. The substance, pace R. Salam, has been a thin greul.

Unless they’ve already been obsolesced, the Democrats need to speak bread and butter to the electorate -- pocket-book issues resonate. Though, this is far easier to say since, as Kulturkampf persist, the Republicans have been successful at framing the debate around values—a debate they’ve soundly thrashed the Democrats in. On balance, my time in Connecticut was good.

Toronto was altogether another story. The city is always beautiful, always vibrant. The nightlife is extraordinary, there is too much to do, too many places to go. Celebrities and athletes mix with quasi-celebrities and quasi-athletes in clubs that putatively have guest lists but admit commoners. The city pulses at two-thirty-am when the bars and clubs let out, enveloping its denizens as they wander the formidable maze of heated concrete and elevated steel at altitudes close to Olympian. There is a depth and context to one’s surrounding, as if this is the three-dimensional and anything else you’ve otherwise encountered is ersatz. It is a city, in a continent, in an era whose history is being debated, written, shaped. For a moment, one is on history's stage, involved in a series of events with no particular coherence to their agents (us). Are we history's objects, simply being acted upon, or are we the subjects pushing the narrative? What will they say of our generation, of our culture?

My friends are always my friends and the city is always hot.

The Wisdom of Crowds

2005-07-04T17:01:00.000-04:00

Let’s wade into l’affaire Homolka and her on-going attempts to prohibit media outlets from publishing her whereabouts. A Quebec Superior Court Justice rejected this plea last week. Too bad for Karla. She’s in a “State of Terror” contend her lawyers, and with no shortage of hate-mail and death threats Ms. Homolka is understandably fearful for her personal safety upon release. (Which, incidentally, is today by sundown.)

Offhandedly, Homolka’s lawyers caution that rather than the major media outlets being the culprit, internet bloggers zealously publishing Ms. Homolka’s whereabouts will create the real threat to her safety. It’s not hard to imagine some unreconstructed vigilante -- a sociopath at the very least -- taking it upon himself to met out society’s just deserts. This isn’t even to speak of the disparate common citizens, struck with a peculiar morbidity, field-tripping it to Québec for the day -- Ms. Homolka’s place of residence their primary draw; and why not Old Quebec for that matter?

There is that side of me that says “This citizen has served her time, let her be.” This is my far too charitable side. And then the sensible side of me says, “Well, actually… It was later proved that Homolka’s involvement in the rape and murder of three women -- one of them her sister -- was far more integral, her mens rea not diminished by her earlier and more dubious testimony. So really, she hasn’t served nearly enough time in prison; and who am I to stop a concerned citizen from airing his/her misgivings.” (I’m not condoning vigilantism.)

Of course I’m not suggesting that the streets of Montreal run with the blood of a triple-murderer. Not at all. Though, the thought that the media, concerned citizens, reckless bloggers, and the denizens of Montreal have to somehow respect Ms. Homolka’s privacy is painfully laughable. And the last time we respected Ms. Homolka’s privacy? (Ok, this is vile demagoguery and silly rhetoric. My bad.) All I have to offer Ms. Homolka is a trite aphorism: If you sow the wind you reap a storm. And did she ever sow the wind.

Sightings

2005-06-29T23:39:00.000-04:00

The approaching night’s dusk was naturally balmy and visibility, considering my waning but once impeccable night-vision, was marginal. Ed Broadbent crosses us on the left as we wire up the thoroughfare toward the House of Commons and the Peace Tower. Inexplicable to us at the time is the medium-size crowd assembled expectantly outside the doors of the Commons—Canada Day celebrations this Friday on the Hill, obligatory stage set-up with large T.V screens and alternating-ly grating lights; maybe the crowds are out early? No—something else entirely.

Man with familiar gait walking towards us surrounded by burly minders and two or three photographers as well as a cameraman who navigates backwards adeptly, like he’s practiced this many times. “I think it’s Paul Martin” my roommate says. Not believing him I raise my hand almost wryly, straining my face with an incredulous smirk, as though offering an affected greeting. “Hello. How are you doing Mr. Martin?” I say. A voice very similar to that of Prime Minister Paul Martin replies. “Fine Thank you. How are you?” Double-taking five or six times, I’ve just realized I was in the presence of the Prime Minister.

And then this realization: How is it possible that I, a common citizen, should be any where that close to the PM? Shouldn’t he exit through the back, possibly? (Indeed he has nothing to worry about; although I have Johnsonian foot speed, my slight upper body can be restrained with very little effort.) So the PM passes five feet from where I stand.

Get on the cell-phone to make self-aggrandizing calls to family and friends, I miss Belinda Stronach pass by me. “She's very attractive” says the roommate. The pastel green power-suit is enveloped by the night, a pate of blond ambition disembodied.

And in order of appearance Joe Vople, Pierre Pettigrew (“Ca va? Il dit. Je dit “Bein”) Hedy Fry, a man who at first appeared to be a chauffeur but on further reflection was house speaker Peter Milliken, Anne McClellan (Big round of applause), Gilles Duceppe, Stephen Dion ( a Quebecer beside me grudgingly confirmed this.) and Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler. Apparently, the same-sex marriage legislation passed in the house; therefore, interested parties were out to congratulate and celebrate.

The Corrections

2005-06-16T20:46:00.000-04:00

The word good would be an incredible understatement. In fact, the word excellent would seem a slight of the first order. (I’m overstating it, I know.) These were but a few of the initial thoughts that came to mind when I endeavored to write a review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, an ambitious novel about family, depression, and our attempts to reconcile expectations and their resulting outcomes.

Set in the fictional Midwestern suburb of St. Judes (Franzen grew up in St. Louis) Franzen introduces the reader to the Lambert family and then begins to construct a series of clever, internal narratives around them: Alfred, the patriarch, is now approaching the winter of his life and is debilitated by the mental atrophy of Alzheimer’s and the corporeal rapaciousness of Parkinson’s; The mother Enid is preening, aspiration-al, and sometimes exacting, though more in a endearing than harsh way; Gary, the first child, is the fulfillment of his parents expectations, the vice president of a Bank, father of three and responsible to a clinical degree; Chip is the middle child struggling to find his moorings after losing his professorship at an Ivy League college for sleeping with a student—he’s the intellectual without a clue; Denise being the youngest child is the emotionally impassive uber-striver who seeks and is rewarded, continually, her father's approval, while, at the same time, staking for herself a life that appears an affront to Enid’s pedagogy.

Alfred and Enid arrive in New York to have lunch with their son Chip and daughter Denise—who’s flown in from Philadelphia—before they depart on a cruise that day. What ensues is nothing short of comic genius and, similarly, tragedy. Chip’s life is seemingly falling apart as he escorts his parents from JFK—only to be met at his apartment by his current girlfriend, Julia, who promptly dumps him after being introduced to Chip’s parents. Ever the irresponsible son, Chip leaves his parents in Denise’s care to persue Julia, embarking on a jarring self-assessment that is both neurotic and forlorn, while falling to find Julia. Chip does, however, find his way to the office of a friend of Julia’s and is offered a job that, though it pays well (much better than his not so lucrative job as a proofreader), appears to be criminal. The job is also in Lithuania—and to accept the offer would mean leaving that day. Naturally, Chip leaves. Denise is left to deflect the probing questions of her mother and watch the degradation of her beloved father.

Franzen then takes the narrative thread to alternating gears of emotional tone. With Gary, we are led through the psychological travails of a man so willing to embody the picture of refined domesticity that his very abiding becomes pathological. He begins to believe that his wife and children are conspiring against him—are driving him to a depression of their own construction. Gary’s wife Caroline is an emotional potentate (this is what I gather) who is adamant—after eight consecutive Christmas of not visiting Enid and Alfred in St. Judes, to Gary servile dismay—of not even considering going this Christmas'—even if it may be the last Christmas the Lamberts have together, even if her lack of compromise is pushing her husband closer and closer to this constructed depression.

Enid and Alfred’s narrative is more comedy than Gary’s grating supplication. Alfred was once a paragon of moral life, self-denying, modest, and truthful. Since his retirement, which was days before his pension was to kick-in (this being incomprehensible and unexplained to Enid) Alfred has wasted away in the basement, off with his own diminishing thoughts. Enid has always been denied the Alfred she hoped she would have when they married: The caring Alfred; the expressive Alfred; the kind Alfred; the, once in a while, sexually attentive Alfred. Her life has been that of a subject to Alfred’s Schopenhauer-ian will. And so the excess of her energy has been devoted to raising her children. And now that this may very well be their last Christmas together in St. Judes, she wants all of her children home for the holidays. Enid is easily my favorite character; she’s full of foibles and neurosis and traffics in a populist, Midwestern charm.

The most intriguing narrative, though, is that of Denise Lambert. I had difficulty keeping my mouth closed, as my jaw kept coming ajar. Not that the lesbianism wasn’t appealing; nor was the lifestyle she led unremarkable. Denise Lambert was singular as a character, touching and at times harsh, strong yet milquetoast. She was without humor but the situations she found herself in were humorous. And that filial love for her father anchors much in her life—it also portends other tectonic revelations.

The Corrections, needless to say, starts off furiously, eases comfortably into the middle, becomes intellectually intriguing during Denise Lambert’s narrative thread, and tidies up well—Franzen’s pacing and tone a touch of methodical mastery. Apparently it took him five years to create this Magnus opus, and at just over six hundred pages Franzen’s style makes the novel incredibly readable; even-though, at parts, it’s a complicated read, it is still very lucid.

Will the Lamberts be together for one last Christmas? Read the book and find out.

Grewalgate

2005-06-08T21:10:00.000-04:00

Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal who so surreptitiously endeavored to entrap Minister of Health Ujjal Dosanjh in a qui pro quo for his, and his wife’s, support of the Liberal budget bill has suddenly taken a leave of absence(follow the chronology)—due, we are led to believe, to stress. Understandably, the stress and growing dread of being found out as a fabricator of tape recordings you earlier alleged to be proof positive of Liberal corruption and influence peddling would be enough to make even the fiercest political animal retreat. Now that the entirety of the recordings have been released—a full four hours!—a number of independent experts say that portions have been doctored. But why the suspicion?

It took Mr. Grewal, with the sage advice of his party it is assumed, over two weeks to release all of the tapes; initially, only a tendentious hour and thirty minutes were released—of which, predictably, reflected poorly on Mr. Dosanjh and Mr. Murphy, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

And now even his wife, Nina Grewal, has distanced herself from the matter by saying “Nobody approached me, I wasn't part of any negotiations.” Mrs. Grewal is also avoiding the press, choosing to leave her office in the East Block through the back doors. Calls to her riding office are being directed to her husband’s office, who is away on leave.

Stephen Harper doesn’t need this. After the Liberals passed their budget bill (more work still needs to be done in committee) whispers about the fate of Stephen Harper’s leadership were soundless, out of respect, but various. Then Tapegate or Grewalgate, what have you, prefigured a grave outcome for the Liberals, insofar as Grewal’s allegations were true. Even if it were the case that the tapes proved ambiguous on the question as to who initiated the meetings, Liberal involvement carried its requisite stench of impropriety.

During this time Harper was strong in his fulminations, and with good reason: the tapes appeared to implicitly convey the Liberals attempt to buy Mr. Grewal’s vote, along with his wife’s.

At the very least it has now been proven that the tapes were doctored, and, as they were in Mr. Grewal’s possession this whole time, questions surrounding his motives have arisen. Mr. Grewal’s leave of absence is only evidence of the doubt Stephen Harper has on the matter. The truth may still lie somewhere in the abstracted middle, but for Stephen Harper and the Conservative party the perception isn’t helpful.

Critical Theory

2005-05-31T23:19:00.000-04:00

I'm reading an interesting book, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, on the intellectual movement founded by the Frankfurt school -- a group of like minded academics and critics whose analyses on culture, capitalism, and society attempted to refigure the impracticalities of Marxian orthodoxy. In a summation of Marxian tenets, David Held, the book's author, offers this.

The progressive rise in the organic composition of capital -- the amount of fixed capital per worker -- exacerbates the inherently unstable accumulation process. In order to sustain this process, it's protagonists’ utilize all means available -- including imperialist expansion and war.
p. 42

Though an obvious point, it is also compelling on many levels. For instance, the relative move towards trade liberalization, fostered by institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF, has sustained the appetites of growing multinationals (usually Western) looking for new and pliant markets (almost always developing countries). Western industrialized nations are no different in this respect and, in essence, underwrite the political legitmacy of these international institutions. The Iraq war has been perceived through this lens, as critics see its rationale to be more convoluted and involving the unintelligible logic of capitalism. To this effect, the London Review of Books had an essay in April's issue entitled Blood for Oil? Its conclusion is eerily persuasive and, therefore, needs to be excerpted at length.

But something has clearly shifted over the last ten years. Even as recently as the late 1990s, there was confidence that the new world of capital penetration would come about essentially by means of agreement between governments and corporations, ‘fiscal discipline’, fine-tuning of subsidy and bail-out, and non-stop pressure from US creditors. What constellation of forces put all this in question is still open to debate. But it happened – precipitately. Cracks began to appear within the World Bank establishment: Western Europe fought with the Washington consensus, and the South often refused to take its bitter medicine. The grotesqueries of Third World indebtedness and First World subsidies to corporate agriculture became more widely recognised. The back-slapping and mutual congratulation of the Uruguay Round descended into the fiasco of Seattle, and then Doha and Cancœn. At Cancœn, an in-house insurgency of 20 nations refused to endorse the massive US-EU subsidies to North Atlantic agriculture and the WTO rules crafted to prevent the South from protecting itself.

This is the proper frame for understanding what has happened in Iraq. It is only as part of this neo-liberal firmament, in which a dominant capitalist core has begun to find it harder and harder to benefit from ‘consensual’ market expansion or corporate mergers and asset transfers, that the preference for the military option makes sense.

Marx had no illusions about the role of force in his own time. But he did seem to believe that the age of violent expropriation was at an end. It was capitalism’s strength that it had internalised coercion, so to speak, and that henceforward the ‘silent compulsions of economic relations’ would be enough to compel the worker to ‘sell the whole of his active life’. We are not the first to think Marx too sanguine in this prognosis. In fact it has turned out that primitive accumulation is an incomplete and recurring process, essential to capitalism’s continuing life. Dispossession is crucial to this, and its forms recur and reconstitute themselves endlessly. Hence the periodic movement of capitalism outwards, to geographies and polities it can plunder almost unopposed. (Or so it hoped, in the case of Iraq.)

Will military neo-liberalism endure? With the US deficit rolling along at $600 billion annually, and the national debt rising to $2.5 trillion, the cost-benefit balance of the strategy looks dubious. And, two years after the tanks rolled across the Euphrates floodplain, the occupation and its Vichy surrogate barely have control of Baghdad. With unemployment running at perhaps 50 per cent, the Mahdi army steadily draws new support from the ranks of the urban unemployed in the slums of Sadr City and Basra, now twice dispossessed: once by Saddam, once by Bush. Even the lustre of the privatised contract economy has tarnished. Of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds allocated by the US Congress in October 2003, less than 9 per cent had been spent a year later – and untold amounts of that was spent on ‘security’. During the same period, more than a hundred criminal investigations of contractors were launched, and cases opened on hundreds of allegations of fraud and ‘waste’. As if to confirm falling expectations, Halliburton is reported to be putting Kellogg, Brown and Root on the block because it has become so unprofitable. So much for the Great Iraqi Oil Robbery. As Rumsfeld has admitted: ‘We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.’ However you calculate it, in the present equation a few more million barrels of oil won’t matter a damn.

The Neo-Mainstream Media Agenda

2005-05-30T23:07:00.000-04:00

Wake up. Early this morning, bleary eyed and cotton mouthed, I heard an interesting report on CBC radio. ‘The public is losing confidence in politicians and public officials in general…’ I was unsurprised. Should such a platitude be so unobvious to the media? For the media the public had even lower regard.

One in three people polled said they had little or no confidence in the media – unchanged from a year earlier. Only 11 per cent had a great deal of confidence in what the media had to say.

I was flummoxed to hear that 'bloggers' may have higher repute with the public than the Mainstream Media (MSM). This is supremely silly; I say: enough already with the blogger triumphalism. If you want your political slant steeper, you’re substance the consistency of a watery broth, the scope and focus negligible, read a political blog. At least this is the case for amateurish political blogs, present company included. Political journalists who maintain blogs are a staple for me; so are fledgling public intellectuals qua writers—for no other reason than ideas shape the world. Political Journalists are backed by incredible news gathering organizations that pay them. Anyone else with a political opinion and the requisite leisure time can register there inaudible gripe.

Why should I find the argument that the public is skeptical of the media misconceived, or merely miss-framed? One reason: if the public has grown skeptical of politicians because of the rise of personally invasive journalism, it should follow that they also appraise this invasive journalism as scurrilous on the media’s part, therefore lowering the opinion they hold for reporters and journalists.

Terry Eastland, in a piece from Wilson Quarterly, speaks to this point.

The negativity in the news may have resulted from the more personalized or interpretative journalism that began appearing in the 1960s. It represented a break from the old norm of objectivity by which reporters were obliged to keep their own views out of articles, and it was thought to help in uncovering the “real story” beyond any official statements and scheduled events. Perhaps the urgent need to compete for smaller pools of viewers and readers also played a role in the rise of negative news. But to judge by opinion polls, the public wasn’t impressed. The negativity, not to mention the arrogance with which it was often served up, caused many to tune out.

So whether the chicken or the egg came first -- if I can construct this awkward analogy -- is difficult to assess and will remain an open question for now. I'll be back to this in a moment.

The good days. Eastland offers up a historical sketch of the idyllic past of the MSM.

The media establishment emerged at a time when Americans generally respected those in authority. But when, beginning in the 1960s, authority took a severe beating, the media establishment was the one authority that actually gained in strength. Crusading reporters and editors became cultural heroes—the rebels and nonconformists who refused to kowtow to anybody. The Watergate scandal in particular confirmed in the media the sense they had of themselves as independent guardians of the public good and the very conscience of the nation in times of crisis. Over the years, judicial decisions also went their way, securing greater protection for the exercise of media power. For the establishment media, life was very good

An improper, slovenly analyzed, postulate: Doesn’t public cynicism greater reflect the electorate’s discernment and sober thought, aided and abetted by journalism’s aim at demystify conventional political fictions? Another query—if the electorate is so malleable, then why is it so disillusioned and jaded? So, is it that the media has been doing it's job overzealously? Maybe.

(Notwithstanding the ideological pall cast by an unintelligible, self-manifesting, disparately unknowing and self-perpetuating, shiftless mass that is the Neoliberal agenda.)

And now back to the politicians. This passage from the CBC report irked me.

The Conservatives came in at 22 per cent – the same level as last year. The NDP, however, was picked by 23 per cent – up four points from last year. But 23 per cent of those polled said none of the parties is best able to run a government with honesty and integrity. That's an increase of five percentage points from last year.

Does it really matter what the respondents to this poll think? Really--that 23 per cent of them believe none of the political parties can govern with honesty and integrity is irrelevance bordering on…. I don’t know, ridiculously, trite irrelevance. Voters already have their own built-in prejudices, either as a result of economics or social experience, so accessing which party can govern with relative probity is patent self selection: you’ll define honesty and integrity on the metric that suits you’re political allegiances—you’ll elide any inconsistencies that don’t agree with these definitions.

(I do this all the time.)

The eternal cynics don’t vote, regardless of the poking and prodding, yet still complain about government. They’re hemming and hawing is of no consequence. (Electoral reform is another issue entirely. And if you are to believe that our current political system is acrimonious, the experiences of PR electoral systems, though definitely fairer as regards plurality, appear far more bizarre and surpassingly acrimonious--'minority governments anyone'?.)

Revenge of the Sith

2005-05-29T22:47:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, like many people, I watched the third and – oddly enough, considering the anachronism – final installment of the Star Wars sextet, Revenge of the Sith. The movie was good—very, very good. Good enough to have me strongly considering an apostasy from the Anglican Church to follow The Jedi Order. I was completely blown away by the scale and proportion of this fictive far, far away universe; surprisingly, the story was far more engaging than I was expecting. We know that Anakin is slowly being seduced by the dark side yet, though we (the audience) cringe as he makes his descent there, secretly cheer him along.

This is my opinion at least.

There are, to be sure, schmaltzy dialogue exchanges – particularly between Padme and Anakin – and an excess of special effects, some of which are apropos and many others just plain excessive. At one point Ben Kenobi is riding this creature that essential looks like an iguana: It’s ridiculous but cool. One gets the feeling that this is all taking place in some miniature world. And it very well may be. But, for me, the movie pulls the narrative tight together. Lucas accomplishes a reasonably fulfilling end: a fitting dénouement to a Sci-Fi classic.

(The aberration of the appalling Attack of the Clones(2002) is unforgivable.)

But, as I said, last weekend I went to an actual theater to watch the Sith. Not even a week later, though I’m loath to admitt it lest the MPAA is monitoring this blog, I downloaded and watched the Sith, comfortably ensconced in my dank, fetid room. I think it’s terrible, really. Think of all the money George Lucas is losing? This is a canard.

The money, the MPAA suggests, isn’t being lost by Mr. Lucas but countless others involved in the production and distribution of movies—the little guy. And I’m not sure whether this year’s meager box office is a persuasive argument against piracy; but it sure seems like it should be.

Of Montreal

2005-05-23T21:02:00.000-04:00

The Public Places By-law prohibits smoking in certain public places in order to protect the city of Ottawa's inhabitants from the public health hazzards and discomforts of second-hand smoke.

[...]

Any indoor area to which the public has access is a public place including such places as retail shops, hairdressers, restaurants, bars, bingo and billiard halls, bowling alleys, taxicabs and limousines. There is no provision for designated smoking rooms in the by-law.

By-law No. 2001-148

This is an excerpt from one of two Ottawa public health by-laws that prohibits smoking in public places—the other one relates to workplaces. If an analogous by-law had existed in Montreal, I have strong reason to believe that my trip there would have been more enjoyable.

This is not to say that there weren’t parts of the trip that I did like. There were a few, actually.

For instance, pursing through the social sciences section at a Chapters on Ste-Catherine, I happened upon a pair of forest green Nike throwbacks who, quiet auspiciously, were on the feet of Garden State(2004) writer and director Zach Braff. Initially I had to convince myself that it wasn’t Zach Braff and that it would be incredibly untoward to corner the innocent celebrity look-a-like. But at this point I was already making my move in his direction.

The Last Kiss is filming in Montreal, which happens to be starting Zach Braff, among others; the screenplay, interestingly enough, was penned by London, Ontario, native Paul Haggis, and is an adaptation of Italian director Gabriele Muccino L'ultimo Baccio (2001).

This was reason enough to assume that it was in fact Zach Braff wearing the forest green Nike throwbacks. “Hey” I said with some incredulity. He replied back hey, and after a few inert moments of mental vacancy, at which time I was trying not to call him Benjamin, I eerily and very inexplicably called him Braff. (Garden State was essentially homage to Mike Nicholas’ film The Graduate--the main character, Dustin Hoffman, was Benjamin Braddock).

Since he did actually extend his hand while replying yes I’m assuming it was Zach Braff. I quickly turned to my friend, who was himself flipping through a book, and motioned at Zach Braff, in hopes that my friend would recognize him. He didn’t. Now this was awkward. “Garden State” I said. My friend recognized him and Braff graciously offered his hand.

I should have asked him if he was going to the Decemberists show that night at La Sala Rossa, or maybe if he needed another member in his entourage, or maybe offered him some script ideas for a tenth Police Academy. I could have asked him a lot of things, but I didn’t. That’s not how we do in Canada.

Sufficiently star struck, the rest of the day consisted of good eating at the Peel Pub then the Decembrists show at La Sala Rossa, and finally a diversity of night spots on St-Laurent and Crescent. Omnipresent during all of this was the carcinogenic aroma of smoke. The Decembrists show was cool, although the prevalence of smokers, especially in such close proximity to each other and me, was very disconcerting. Being out at some of the "trendy" Montreal clubs left me longing for the staid, sterile clean air of bars in Ottawa, Waterloo, and London.

Montreal—Quebec, for that matter—has astonishing cultural sites which I’ve been to. That a socially progressive city, a darling among the top cities of the world, still hasn’t passed by-laws against smoking in public places is a little troubling. With New York already limiting smoking in public places, it’s time for other major cites to follow suit. The economic interest of private ownership has to be balance against the social interest of public health. But on balance Montreal was alright.

Turnabout

2005-05-18T20:31:00.000-04:00

Hyper-speed prediction-falsification is not the case with my earlier thesis that the Liberal government wouldn’t fall as a result of being defeated on Thursday’s budget vote. As if this should be news to anyone, Belinda Stronach, former CEO of Magna, former Peter MacKay flame, perpetual political neophyte, did a fancy two-step across the figurative floor of the House of Common to join the Liberals. So astounded was I with this development that I literally (literally) jumped out of my shoes—my feet returning to the ground minutes later. Now my reaction should come as no surprise since, as has been stated prior, I’m a Liberal partisan.

(This is for no other reason than the electoral viability of the NDP is, well, feeble. Though they are considered the most ethical political party in the country, the NDP aren’t likely to form government in my life time.)

And now a digression, if you’ll indulge me. The jilted lover meme is stirring and incredibly poignant. Whether it’s purely political strategy or an honest account is difficult to assess; though, to be fair, the two can’t be mutually exclusive in this case. Seeing Peter MacKay nearly in tears as he spoke of the close affection he had for Belinda, her children, and her family, and then speak of the inexplicable betrayal (although he didn't use that word) of her decision was decidedly plaintive. The cameraman attempted to focus onto MacKay’s eyes as he fought back tears—a person shudders.

But on with the political machinations. The Liberals and NDP are now up one seat to 152, which ties the Conservative and Bloc seat count. Two independent MP’s, Chuck Cadman and David Kilgour, will determine the outcome. Kilgour looks serious but undecided and his appeals for increased attention and funding to Darfur is worthy political quid pro quo. However, there is something about Kilgour that strikes me as being incredibly flaky. Cadman, a jovial, ready-to-please type, appears more pliant. He’ll bring home the vote. Everybody that thought they had clout yesterday is doubling back, understanding that falling in line with the governing party is canny political strategy.

Apres Nous, Le Deluge. Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams is one voice among many advising two regional MP’s, Loyola Hearn and Norm Doyle, to vote yea on the Liberal budget, as it would assure the passage of the Atlantic Accord act—an act that means $2 billon for the Atlantic provinces. This seems to be working. And what of the remaining Bloc and Conservative MP’s who, after realizing it unlikely they’ll defeat the budget bill, consider the electoral calculus of voting against a healthy pork budget? If they’re smart, thoughtful to the necessity of political survival, they’ll vote for the bill.

Let me explain: the budget bill is a beautiful document because it’s like a pristine brook that reflects a sumptuous image. A person looking at the bill sees what they want— since it’s essentially designed to be everything to everyone. Vote against the bill -- when it’s going to pass anyway -- and leave yourself vulnerable to the argument that “You voted against childcare, against the municipalities, against monies for health care, against struggling students, against the environment, against the west, against the east—you sir, or madam, voted against Canada.” Very persuasive indeed.

So even if the Liberals do call an election after the Gomery inquiry adjourns -- the public outrage from which, by that time, would have already dissipated -- the Bloc and Conservatives will be open to this line of attack. However, the Conservatives, logic says, would be more vulnerable to this than the Bloc.

Addendum

Funny how things change so quickly. It wasn't even a week and a half ago that the Liberals lost two consecutive confidence votes on Bloc and Conservative motions. Procedurally these motions weren't considered actual confidence votes and, therefore, the Liberals weren't required to disslove government. But they nonetheless made the Liberals look feckless--notwithstanding the house work they also impeded. And now, a week hence, the Liberals scooped Ms. Stronach, secured the vote of Chuck Cadman, and passed a fairly socially progressive budget bill.

Not so hot.

2005-05-13T23:32:00.000-04:00

Ok, maybe this month of May hasn't been as unusually hot or warm as I had suggested in an earlier post. The last two days have been unseasonable chilly --down right cold -- despite it being generally sunny. But the political wrangling hasn't cooled down. Another day—another sanctimonious demand for the Liberal’s to step down and call an election.

The Bloc and Conservatives, again, pushed through and passed a motion to adjourn the house, bringing to a halt any house proceedings of substance or action. It becomes farcical when an opposition, in anticipation to a confidence vote they’ll likely not defeat (the Liberal Budget), stymie any convincible government work. Although most work is done within the “committees”, think it unlikely that anything of consequences is being accomplished.

In an interesting aside, Stephen Harpers thinks it's "shameful... disgusting and disgraceful" that the Liberals are holding their budget vote a day after Darrel Stinson's -- Conservative MP from British Columbia -- cancer surgery (queue the violins) . But to the rescue is our perpetual social conscience, the NDP: Ed Broadbent has suggested, and the Conservatives have duly accepted, that a member from his party not participate in the May 19th vote out of fairness.

I’m still steadfast to my earlier assessment that the Liberal budget will pass. However, I think it may be misconceived for two reasons. First, I grossly underestimated the organizational union the Conservative and Bloc have entered into. It’s not an unfair trope to say that the ‘Conservatives are sleeping with the Separatists’. (They clearly are, and why shouldn’t they? They have nothing to be ashamed of; both the Conservatives and the Bloc have at least one thing in common—they both hate Canada. I should, to be fair, put the point finer, and less infelicitously: they both hate, or strongly dislike, the federal government. The Bloc wants Quebec out of Canada, this much is obvious; while the Conservatives want the federal government, already seen as considerably diffuse in its centralized powers, shrunk down to the size of a pin head, leaving provinces to transact business between each other – without, of course, the invasive hands of the federal government in the way.)

Second, they seem to be really, really serious. The Conservatives and Bloc are frothing at the mouth. It’s time to put this rabid dog down.

The government won't fall...

2005-05-11T22:50:00.000-04:00

On Thursday May 19 Parliament will be tasked to vote on the Liberals proposed budget bill. If it is voted down, Canadians are back to the polls—again; and only 10 months after the last election. As the heat and humidity rise in this unusually hot month of May, so does the political rancor and vituperative rhetoric. The Conservatives and Bloc are affecting all the right histrionics of the politically indignant, anxious to defeat the visibly damaged Liberals.

This is only made worse by the daily revelations of further and more troubling Liberal misdeeds coming out of the Gomery Inquiry. Meanwhile, the NDP, our country’s erstwhile marginalized social conscience, is doing what it can to help buttress the Liberals seat total, against that of Bloc and Conservatives combined. Some suggest that by acceding to a few of the particulars in the Liberals re-amended budget – the delaying of the corporate tax-cuts being one; which were initially taken out of the budget as per Jack Layton’s request – the NDP are playing useful idiots to Liberal hegemony.

I, on the other hand, see this differently. Before Jack Layton, in Stephen Harper’s words, made a deal with the devil, the Liberal budget allotted only $10 million for student loans and student debt relief, and $250 for social housing and miscellaneous social project. Those numbers, respectively, jumped to $150 million and $1 billion after Layton’s Faustian bargain.

I like that math.

But still, a push is being made for an election call even before the Liberal’s budget bill can be voted on. The Liberals lost a putative non-confidence vote yesterday – a procedural motion emanating from the public accounts committee – resulting in Conservative and Bloc demands that they step down and call an election immediately.

Immediately… Immediately?

As matter of form, constitutional convention dictates that a government only falls on a loss of confidence from a vote by a majority of the house—when this vote deals specifically with a money bill. The precedent here is the Mackenzie King government resigning after a motion of non-confidence that was unrelated to a money bill. However, since then, money bills -- the budget specifically – are considered the only legitimate confidence votes.

So why aren’t Bloc and Conservatives willing to wait for a legitimate confidence vote, like next week’s budget?

One reason: the budget will pass. And here’s why. During the last month the Liberal government has scattered the seeds of its success all throughout the country: $3 billion dollars to the Provincial government in Ontario, $338 million to British Columbia, child care monies for various Canadian municipalities, redistribution of the gas-tax to the cities, %100 royalties from offshore drilling to the eastern provinces. The Liberal government will not fall for all of these reasons and much more.

The Bloc and Conservatives know this. In fact, though the deciding vote will come down to the speaker of the house – Milliken, a Liberal – count on a number of Bloc MP’s to support the Liberal budget; a budget that is so incredibly socially progressive that it would hurt their constituency cred if they voted otherwise. So this is my prediction—the vote will be 155-150 for the Liberal budget.

To the wilderness...

2005-05-05T23:26:00.000-04:00

Revising history can be a rather thorny venture -- especially if done purely out of spite. Chuck Guite, former mandarin and trafficker in the venal art of patronage, is doing some incredibly heavy lifting for Jean Chrétien; at least this is what I'm suspecting. Testimony by Guite in the last two days has implicated both Paul Martin and, yes, John Manley.

(Remember Manley the prime ministerial hopeful but two years ago. This was only the case as a result of Martin pushing Chrétien out of office earlier than he was comfortable with.)

And now: Jean Chrétien is exacting his revenge indirectly, if at all -- which may be considerable. He's doing this through one of his hatchet-man-- Chuck Guite; and the bloodletting looks like it could hurt the future of the Liberal party. From the Globe and Mail is this paean:

And Mr. Martin went to lengths again Thursday to ensure that his denial was clear, telling reporters after a cabinet meeting, that Mr. Guité's claims that he had discussed assurances that Vickers & Benson would not lose federal work were also discussed with former industry minister John Manley and former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano were also false.

Fortunately the veracity of Mr. Guite's accusations are in doubt given that they can't be verified -- his claims aren't only hearsay, the individual who provided him with said information has passed away. Still, I'm beginning question Chrétien’s ominous presence, as it appears his attempts at retribution could have dire consequences, both politically and culturally.

These tactics are desperate and telling of a personality bent on persevering personal legacy rather than purging an arrogant clique within the Liberal party. (Did I just say that?) But understand this -- it is only a theory. My theory.

If Chrétien is responsible for any of this scorched-earth razing -- because we know he has the influence to direct Guite to lie down -- then his legacy, as written by the political historians in the decades to come, will be a pitiful one. He will be the man who sent the Liberal party into the political wilderness.

in absentia

2005-04-24T17:44:00.000-04:00

I’m unconvinced that doctors have an incredible workload. Actually, I’m very much convinced that they do little to no work at all—except, of course, for some analyses of symptoms, the determination of particular aliments, and the dispensation of the appropriate medication. Otherwise, if you’re not a surgeon or perform some-type of operation or procedure at least three times weekly, you’re not doing much.

I should state this clearly: nurses, personal care assistants, therapists, orderlies, and administrative support workers do all the heavy lifting. Doctors, on the whole, do very little.

Here’s an example. Imagine you spend a twenty-four hour stay at your area hospital—the particular injury or aliment, in this case, is inconsequential since the condition has been judge severe enough to admit you into care. Your diet, relatively minimal but of the requisite daily nutrition, consists of three meals on a sliding scale of digestion capacity; liquids only, soft foods, normal and hard foods, ect.

Let’s say you’ve been admitted for an aliment that has caused you to lose a considerable amount of blood. You’re blood pressure is low, you’re hemoglobin is low, and, likewise, you’re energy is low. One would imagine that such a physical state requires either more nutrition or supplements directly aimed at re-establishing a healthy stasis—effectively increasing you’re energy levels. This isn’t the case.

The diet, at least in my experience, stays the same irrespective of particular nutrition deficiencies caused by the aliment. If you’re in there for an excess of fluids in your lungs, clotting of blood flow in particular vascular areas, or internal bleeding as a result of a ruptured vessel, don’t expect a varied and flexible diet—one that targets and alleviates you’re particular deficiency.

But I guess this seems somewhat sensible. The preponderance of organizing a complex and individualistic nutrition regime would, doubtless, be irrationally burdensome for the hospital. Moreover, the economy of scale offers a far more expansive nutrition coverage than an individualistic regime would—even if barely sufficient.

This is where private clinics find there niche. Individuals with the economic wherewithal to purchase services like individualistic nutrition regimes and on-call professional medical assistances will. And they’ll find these services at private clinics.

Aside from diet, what other considerations must be accounted during your hospital stay?

One, the most vital in my opinion, is the face time registered by the personal care assistants, nurses, and orderlies; you will see these people all the time. Nurses will be checking your vitals on the hour every hour during the daylight hours, and every three hours while you lie sleepless in the dark, bleak corner of a hospital room. Personal care assistants will fill-in the gaps where nurses aren’t able to, given time constraints and numbers of patients; though, they do this with less authority and usually defer to the nurses. And at the bottom of this hierarchy are the orderlies—who do everything else; everything else that is important, like red blood cells carrying oxygen throughout the body. They serve the food, clean the floors, move the patients, bathe the immobile and pained, and perform any and all necessary errands that keep the hospital smoothly operating—or operating at all.

I would be remiss not to comment on hospital administration. They are, quiet simply, the hospitals nerve center, the brain, where all these movable pieces are synthesized into a coherent whole.

Oh yeah, wasn’t I intending to speak on what doctors do? In the length of the piece you’d be led to believe that I neglected to mention the duties performed by doctors; but I did not. This is what they do: every morning at around eight, it is said, doctors make their rounds, informing patients as to the status of their conditions. The reality is that they show up around ten, if not later, mumble a few indelicate bromides, and then tell you whether you’re staying for another night, or will be free to go. You will see you’re doctor, or a doctor, for about five minutes a day. Seriously. But maybe I’m being unfair; I suppose they have a large number of patients to talk to. They probably do. For now, I will remain unconvinced that doctors are assiduous workers. I have good sources.

Addendum: (Surely they perform surgeries and procedures, but these are the few who actually do considerable work.)

The Crisis

2005-04-21T22:50:00.000-04:00

Despite a few awkward glances at his que cards, the standard vocal stutter step, Paul Martin gave a solid speech this evening; an apologia for the current contretemps brought about by the Gomery inquiry (GI). Martin’s message was clear: Don’t defeat this tenuous minority government—let Judge Gomery do his work. This is a strong yet simple message, but whether it gains traction is an open question. If it should, the Liberals will be given a reprieve until the inquiry tables its final report sometime in December. If it doesn’t, however, a May election looks imminent.

The Conservatives, the NDP, and the Bloc all have their fingers on the proverbial trigger, and if the right polling data convinces them— they’ll pull it. Some polls have the Conservatives at 34%, and the Liberals and NDP at 24%. But their likely electoral fortunes face conflicting data. A number of surveys have suggested that around %53 Canadians aren’t keen on the prospect of another election. (The last one being less than a year ago) Call it political fatigue. So, if a vote were forced by any other party than the Liberals, 5 out of those 10 Canadians would, it should follow, punish the opportunistic party. Yet, I’m not so sure. People have legitimate reasons to be more than mad at the Liberals.

Even though I voted for the Green Party in the last federal election—for reasons dealing with electoral parity through the public financing of fringe parties (a monetary vote)—I consider myself a Liberal partisan. As the evidence trickled out from the GI, I found myself blasé by much of the opposition’s criticism. I thought, naturally: why wouldn’t they clamor so affectedly? That’s what opposition parties do. I also assumed that what happened with the sponsorship scandal, or Ad scam, was dirty politics as usual. I was wrong—if only partially.

It was politics as usual a la Sir John a Macdonald Canadian Pacific Railways. Funneling public monies to friends and political supporters and tendering ridiculous federal contracts without follow up auditing and accountancy seems somewhat understandable; I can imagine this sort of thing happening in the yesteryears and golden years of Canadian politics—and it did. But doing this with very little paper trail of large sums of cash dispensed to people, with optics alone, that appear to be close friends is sloppy and incredibly unsophisticated.

The thing that disappoints me—I understand that political direction in bureaucracies creates patronage, inevitably—is how blatant and unthinking the Liberals were, most particularly Jean Chrétien. Maybe I was hoping that the corruption would have at least been more elaborate, convoluted, or slightly legal. The sponsorship program was not. It was dreadfully obvious and incredibly illegal.

Ironically, Paul Martin was all too eager to push Chrétien out, which may be some evidence to Martin’s actual knowledge of the sponsorship cash-grab. Who’d want to inherit that? And now, minority governments as far as the eye can see. A May election augers a Conservative minority not likely to last any longer than this current minority. How will the Liberals hold off a May election? The dynamic in Quebec appears to be the strongest appeal to fear the Liberals can make to voters. If the Bloc sweeps 75 seats in Quebec, they’ll call for another referendum and Au revoir Canada. I don’t think the referendum will be successful, but it will be called, putting pressure on Charest’s already smarting provincial Liberals. So, it seems fairly underhanded, though this is what generally happens, but the Liberals have to eqaute a vote for the Conservatives as a vote for the dissloution of the federation. Who knows, it may work.

Addendum (Opposition response): Stephen Harper’s eyes are creepy; this man should not be Prime Minister. Jack Layton makes me feel like buying a hybrid. Gilles Duceppe was less scary than usual—which isn’t saying much. The overall opposition response to the Martin speech: It’s not a Canadian crisis, it’s a Liberal crisis.

Random notes. a) Death Cab For Cutie has just been obsolesced, tonight at around 8:14, with their appearance on the second season shark jumping show, The O.C. b) A German Pope? Huh? c) Surprise, surprise, the Cleveland Cavaliers didn’t make the playoffs. d) The blog turned 1 on April 16; more on this later.

Acrimony

2005-04-08T01:18:00.000-04:00

Bloc Party is dope. The world honors (says goodbye to) John Paul II tomorrow; let's hope the ceremonies proceed without incident. On April 2, ironically the day of the Pope's death, my older sister gave birth to a 7 lbs 8 ounce wonder kid named Jacob.

At this point, sleep is very necessary. But, I should make some passing comments on the week that was Canadian politics. First, and definitely center, was the not so inaccessible testimony of a one Mr. Brault during the ‘closed to the public’ public inquiry. A publication ban on his earth-moving testimony about a decade of Liberal corruption didn't stop shadowy political cadres -- the Conservative party of Canada being one of them, I suspect -- from disseminating the testimony to reputable American bloggers, Captains Quarters.... think Swift Boat Vets for Truth advocacy.

To say the very least, Mr. Brault's testimony, though sensational, was equally underwhelming. Far from revealing the venal underbelly of political machinations, the testimony, and the Gomery commission generally, is the natural histrionics of ossified, interminable political leadership devouring itself -- the Liberals. The hysteria and malign displayed by the Conservatives are not unnatural for a desperate excuse of a political party attempting to reacquire a sense of semblance.

More later on the Conservative moves to moderation.

Quebec isn't without some blame, also. Acting as though such corruption is in the pale to politics as usual, unworthy of electoral probity, is laughable. Allan Gregg said it best: "This is how politics in Quebec works. The federal government pays for their unity." (Not an actual quote; it's reconstructed from memory) So, on this front, nothing appears to be so intriguing as to portend the demise of the minority government.

Second in the week of political Canadiana is the Liberal strategy of acting like the victim. It seems, as they have suggested, that some shadowy political miscreants my have perpetrated fraud in guise as card carrying Liberals -- sure, and Michael Jackson is innocent. (Cochran wouldn't even rise from his eternal slumber to take on this lost cause:God rest his soul) The Liberals chose the worst week to 'introduce' this theory. Ten months too late, to be sure.

Third, Harper's been offering some suggestions to beleaguered Premier Dalton McGuinty, undoubtedly with the effect of coming across as a moderate and helpful federal leader, something Paul Martin is still managing to figure out. Harper hopes, I think, this tactical position appeals to Ontarians searching for principled leadership, trying to poach some disaffected Ontario Liberals. He is devastatingly wrong. Underestimating Ontarian animus toward Dalton McGuinty while similarly allying yourself, your political party, and your political aspirations to ire inducing Dalton McGuinty is political suicide layered in Potemkin garb, underneath which is electoral genocide.

Again, Bloc Party is dope. It is very necessary that I sleep now.

Gentrification

2005-03-29T19:55:00.000-05:00

I live in a peculiar place. First, I should say, I live in Ottawa—not necessarily peculiar in any way except for the fact that the Federal legislature can be found here; or, in more Canadianese, National parliament. On occasion, I’ve been lead to believe that I live in downtown Ottawa when, instead, I actually live close to downtown Ottawa. This is a difference without a distinction: I live close enough to Metcalf to throw rocks at, and maybe hit, the Ottawa Congress Centre. What am I trying to get at, exactly? Good question— I’m glad you asked.

Where I’m located is, as I joked to my roommate once, “A soci-economic fault line; the margins or, better still, the vortex through which any number of social realties tear apart as a result of the sheer centrifugal force of Gentrification.” I didn’t put it this long-windedly to him—but I should be forgiven: this is print.

Gentrification is the process by which a previously economically depressed area becomes economically viable. This is done, obviously, by the acquisition and re-development of once dilapidated and condemned real estate. I remember seeing this happening in areas of downtown Detroit, where canny developers scooped up generous lots of real estate for below, as in subterranean below, market value—in some cases only $1000 for obscene amounts square-footage.

Back to Ottawa: as I was saying, the peculiarity of my area is similar. Gentrification is happening; but first, some context. (Imagine me standing outside, in front of my place. It will help.)

If I were to walk two blocks to the south, I’d find myself in a thriving, dissolute environment, replete with prostitutes, drug dealers, and social dependents —I want to say criminals, too, although I can’t say this positively. As if this shouldn’t be odd enough, If I were to go one block east from my digs—and this is being overstated; maybe it’s eleven strides, if that—I’d be overcome by the site of large Victorian homes, functional yet generic townhouse duplexes, and neatly modern, but faux, Brownstones(right down to the red sandstone). I have now entered family living and young-professional territory, where, I could imagine, neighbor visits neighbor, commenting on how white their cashmere sweaters are—I joke.

Going further east through this areas, one will come upon Bank Street, a main street in Ottawa that is populated, to the south mostly, by posh boutiques, excellent used book stores, rare specialty food shops, urbane pubs, and nearly too many Café and Coffee houses. This area is lovingly dubbed The Glebe. The area becomes Hyde Park Ottawa fast, as one quickly notices various embassies and luxury cars with inarticulate names. The Glebe is not Rockcliffe or Rosedale, clearly; but it’s not Bronson or Somerset, either. This is fully evolved affluence styling itself as bohemian cosmopolitanism. This is where gentrification emanates—flowing down Bank and Bronson, expanding Glebe proper.

Back to me, and now two blocks to the west: a lower and working class Italian neighbor, the jewel of which is Preston Street, spills forth with cultural verve and gastronomical draws—my favorite, De Rienzo’s: Italian sandwiches par excellence. Two blocks to the north, and running perpendicular to Preston, is Somerset, an upper-wardly mobile Chinese community assiduously trying to shed its working class roots, or so it seems.

So where do I live, in a descriptive sense, you ask? On the fault line: all the cultural and economic threads I’ve, heretofore, noted create the pastiches I live in. Social dependents, nuclear-family homes, extended Italian families, young professionals, and needlessly wordy students all call where I live home -- for the time being, that is.

As for gentrification, upscale condominiums are materializing, north and south, on Bronson, which will likely invite boutique shops that cater to them. Doubtless this will appreciate real estate prices in the surrounding areas, leading to increased rates of property taxation. If you’re a home owner, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if you aren’t, it will mean increases in rent—increases that generally move quicker than relative increases in income. The amount of one’s income relative to the amount they pay for housing will predicate who moves first. The exodus will be composed of large families, lower income earners, and social dependants moving to more affordable housing, in the suburbs, one hopes.

I’m not entirely convinced this may be the case. With power centers, attractive swaths of property, and relative seclusion, suburban homes aren’t exactly inexpensive. Moreover, mobility and the dearth of available labour is another drawback. I’m unaware of a striving suburban constituency that is moderately affordable to live in and flush with available employment. Especially with fizzle of the technology markets, castrating nearly 16,000 jobs from Ottawa and leaving barren Silicon Valley North -- places like Stittville particularly -- this constituency seems elusive. As a consequence, people are staring to move further to the margins; Gatineau, Quebec, for example. Here rent is rock bottom and mobility into the city is tolerable.

Luckily, I’ll be out of the country before this comes to pass.

And as for solutions: I can’t say that I have any. These are some extremely powerful forces that, while moving imperceptibly slow, manifest as immovable realties almost instantaneously. I think this is a matter of logic, economics, and comparative social spheres, the separation of which confuses our understanding of the relevant issues—treating what is actual as though it were necessary.

The economics of gentrification are necessary because we say they are, and its logic appealing because we’ve begged the question: Economic flourish and viability is good; therefore, gentrification, the economic flourish of a previously depressed area, is good, if not better, and therefore necessary. But the logic is problematic for reasons dealing with what exactly good is, and to whom this good is generally directed. This, it must be understood, necessitates the analysis of comparative social spheres in the context and process of gentrification. Not only that, the conclusions and outcomes flowing from gentrification should be assessed comprehensively. The tautology that gentrification creates economic viability full stop and without deeper analysis will not do. I will stop now.

What's the matter with the Raptors?

2005-03-26T21:47:00.000-05:00

It's a foregone conclusion—the Raptors aren't likely to make the playoffs. Worse still, they're dropping games like the Atlanta Hawks. (The game tonight is versus the lowly Hawks.) The matter with the Raptors is grizzled vet Jalen Rose. Too often during crunch time (they affably named him Captain Crunch) Rose takes it upon himself to be the Raptors' sole savior.

Now, I wouldn't have a problem with this if he was consistent, and it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if the Raptors were actually winning. Further, I’d care even less if a player like Chris Bosh wasn't on the team.

Unfortunately, Jalen Rose isn't consistent, the Raptors aren't winning, and a player like Chris Bosh is, in fact, on the team. Therefore, this Captain Crunch ball-hog nonsense is grating, to say the very least. Chris Bosh is an amazing young talent with freakishly mature fundamentals; and, to my chagrin, he’s being grossly underutilized by Sam Mitchell.

I love Jalen Rose—especially considering his Fab-five legacy—but he needs to quickly understand, and Sam Mitchell has to make this pellucidly clear, that no longer can he be considered option one. If the Raptors are to succeed in the future, Chris Bosh has to be option number one. He's tough, competitive and plays with the pride of a champion. When was the last time someone said that of Vince Carter?

(By the way, the Raptors won; Chris Bosh scored 32 points and grabbed 12 rebounds.)

Sea Change

2005-03-24T16:12:00.000-05:00

In These Times has an excellent piece by Christopher Hayes on Progressives' fight for America’s soul. It offers a number of interesting yet simple proposals and, not incidentally, proves instructive on many levels beyond American politics. It’s the beginnings of a political tract, and may prove indispensable in the future. I suggest it be read, bookmarked, read, emailed, read, and reposted—maybe even here on Dominion.

The burning city.

2005-03-23T16:25:00.000-05:00

Hey, cool: That Pizza place down the street from me which has egregiously bad pizza that is egregiously expensive is no longer in business -- for the time being, at least. But seriously, 13 people are left without residence and significant damage has been wrought to a thriving commercial area surrounding Bank Street. A used book store I frequent, Book Bazaar, is right across the street. Luckily, it was spared.

Down to the burning city.

2005-03-15T01:18:00.000-05:00

I’ve always had this recurring dream: I’m standing in the middle of a road looking forward into the horizon of a cityscape. I’m young—about five—and to my left is a home, rather modest, with two girls my age sitting on steps that attach to the porch. They stand in some of this dream’s different variants; they sit in others. But they’re always in the dream. To my right is a larger home. It’s were I live and I can intuitively sense this. From the cityscape a billow of smoke winds skyward—it’s as though there is a building on fire, or maybe the whole city is one fire?

The houses to my left and right are the only ones down this long road, surrounded by brush and expansive, colorful vegetation. My perspective is elevated since I’m able to look down toward the burning building or buildings or city, which are quiet a distance away. Behind me there is nothing but blue sky—blue sky that appears to have no depth whatsoever; or maybe it’s the edge of a cliff? Only a small piece of road—five feet in length, maybe—a patch of fresh grass and a bush are behind my left shoulder. It feels like the end of the world or the end of the universe is behind me—as though nothing exists beyond this point.

Or maybe it’s the beginning of existence; the start of consciousness for me. Behind me is quite possibly the unconscious slumber of thought searching for manifestation, of the “I” searching for ontology. I remember this dream because it’s historical; at least in an allegorical sense.

These are some of my first living memories. I’ve had other dreams that correspond to actual historical events in my earlier childhood, confirmed and attested to by older relatives. Sequentially, these other early dreams of childhood recollection are equivocal and contain elements of fuller spatial depth. Three dimensions of space and another one of time pervades in these recollections. In this recurring dream, I’m almost stepping into time—into existence. The two girls are historical: when I was about three I lived across from two young girls my age. We were playmates. Our home was elevated and looked down towards a cityscape.

The symbolism of this dream became far more salient as I read an essay be Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek—of Marxist Lacanian bent. (And of course, Lacan theorizes that the infant moves from the unconscious non-subjectivity to the objective “I” referent.)

In his essay, The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion, Zizek posits that the reality we attempt to escape to—away from the unreality of a capitalist consumerist paradigm—is itself an ideology. Wondering what could be behind our societal veneer, Zizek says this:

This final shot of The Truman Show may seem to enact the liberating experience of breaking out from the ideological suture of the enclosed universe into its outside, invisible from the ideological inside. However, what if it is precisely this "happy" denouement of the film (let us not forget: applauded by the millions around the world watching the last minutes of the show), with the hero breaking out and, as we are led to believe, soon to join his true love (so that we have again the formula of the production of the couple!), that is ideology at its purest? What if ideology resides in the very belief that, outside the closure of the finite universe, there is some "true reality" to be entered?

The entire essay is loaded with Lacanian jargon and inscrutable psychoanalytic allusions. Yet it is nonetheless an interesting read; humorous and measured in tone. Why I recalled my recurring dream during the essay, I’m not particularly sure. But the questions and symbols still remain. What do these two girls embody? Am I stepping into consciousness away from non-existence? And why this road down towards the burning city?

Who stole Ohio?

2005-03-13T17:45:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens puts on the white hat while penning a revelatory essay in March's Vanity Fair. Apropos of November 2, 2004, Hitchens delves into the voting irregularities through-out the electorally crucial state of Ohio—a state that eventually paved the way for a second Bush term. Here's an interesting excerpt:

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

[...]

There are some other, more random factors to be noted. The Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, was a state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign at the same time as he was discharging his responsibilities for an aboveboard election in his home state. Diebold, which manufactures paper-free, touch-screen voting machines, likewise has its corporate headquarters in Ohio. Its chairman, president, and C.E.O., Walden O’Dell, is a prominent Bush supporter and fund-raiser who proclaimed in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” (See “Hack the Vote,” by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, April 2004.) Diebold, together with its competitor, E.S.&S., counts more than half the votes cast in the United States. This not very acute competition is perhaps made still less acute by the fact that a vice president of E.S.&S. and a Diebold director of strategic services are brothers.

The Godfather

2005-03-13T14:42:00.000-05:00

News flash: The second Godfather is dreadfully overrated. Often considered one of the best sequels in contemporary cinema, the second Godfather seems, I think, to lack a unifying narrative. Don't get me wrong, it's a truly compelling story, and no doubt the treatment was moving when pitched to studio executives (obviously helped on by the success of the first Godfather) but sequentially, Coppola clumsily weaves two stories that vary in proportion.

The first, about Vito Corleone's escape from Sicily and eventual rise in New York, is proportional and persuasively portrayed by a young De Niro—proportional in that the narrative thread offers a singular progression. The second, about Don Michael Corleone's struggle to hold together a burgeoning family empire, is unproportional and plods on without a coherent or reasonable focus—it’s the height of summer one moment, then, without warning, or standard datelines, it's new year in Havana, 1959, as the city irrupts into pre-revolutionary looting; strange indeed, especially considering the stunted linearity of character development up until this point: Where was Fredo the whole time? Why wasn't a hit placed on Roth sooner? Is Senator Geary a necessary character?

The second narrative also fails in establishing a goal. We're given an ad hoc explanation as to why the Corleone family is called to testify at what, I can only guess, are Senate Hearings on criminal syndicates—although the viewer quickly understands that the Corleone family is public enemy number one. And even then, little is made of how easily Don Michael Corleone evades indictment: a reasoning that can’t even make sense of it self manifests ex nihilo.

The film seems to run out of breath far from the finish, dragging its languid corpse to the end, finally; only to appear confused and confusing. The narrative of Vito Corleone sets the table for, and amplifies the significance of, the first Godfather—despite this being done anachronistically; it’s a worthy compliment nonetheless. Michael Corleone's narrative searches for meaning and comes up wanting.

It may just be a matter of expectations and payoffs. Having not actually seen this movie, and hearing its vaunted reputation, a pristine mythology was neatly constructed around it. I had not, in any way, come across a counter assessment—or even a minority report. I expected more from this movie than it was able to deliver. It’s troubling that I wasn’t able to appreciate the film for what it was and not for what I'd expected it to be. In the final analysis, it may have been my loss for not watching it sooner.

Della

2005-03-11T01:35:00.000-05:00

In the fiction section of the New Yorker online there's this rather cute finish to a tightly written, quietly poignant short story by Anne Enright:

And it seemed so absurd to Della—the thirty years that these things mattered, out of the eighty years that made up a life, eighty or more—that she found herself laughing out loud.

“What’s the joke?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Don’t let me stop you,” he said.

“I won’t, so,” she said.

And he turned his face to her; gleeful, as if he could see her quite clearly—a woman in his kitchen who was far from being a virgin, a woman who would, no doubt, find him quite attractive, in the end.

It has always intrigued me how a carefully constructed series of sentences--in the coherence of a story, linear or not--evokes a clutch of different feelings.

The Yes Men

2005-03-10T02:19:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching an incredibly hilarious film that I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of earlier(It was released in 2003). The Yes Man—a mockumentary in Michael Mooresuque fashion—follows two ingenious and creative anti-globalization activists posing as WTO representatives from Paris, to Finland, to New York, places in between, and then finally to Australia where they dramatically announce the dissolution of the WTO.

The Yes Men, Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, are invited to speak at a number of international conferences on matters of multilateral trade policy—this, of course, on the strength of their faux WTO website that actually criticizes WTO practices. Conference organizers, who clearly neglect to authenticate the veracity of Bonanno and Bichlhaum’s site, fall pray to the Yes Men’s use of irony, with a tough of abject realism, to openly mock conference members and convey what they feel to be the actual function of the WTO: To beggar poor nations for the benefit of large multinational corporations.

The most side splittingly funny part of the film, for me at least, came when Andy Bichlbaum (impersonating a WTO representative) explained to an assembled group of conference members that the American Civil War was unnecessary, since natural market forces would have solved the icky problem of slavery. Covered in a gold spandex body suit, with a phallic shaped inflatable shaft protruding from his crotch, Bichlbaum also introduce conference members to the future of efficient management: A skin tight leisure suit that allows managers—through a protruding shaft that contains a computer screen at its tip—to monitor the every move of employees all over the world—employees who’ve been implanted with an electronic sensory chip that corrects intransigent employees with electrical shocks, naturally. This consequently frees up more leisure time for managers to ski, enjoy sunsets, and pop champagne, as the Yes Men’s comically professional power point illustrates.

Needless to say, the film is irreverent and thoughtfully evocative. Beneath the easy smiles of anti-corporatist pranksterism lies a deadly serious and obtusely understood issue: Globalization’s discontents will soon register their appeals to the WTO un-reality based paradigms. I’m not usually a Cassandra; but if what’s going on in Latin American is any portent, then a sea change in international affair is likely taking place. Very, very sleepy; cogency slowly diminishing.

Latin America

2005-03-09T15:54:00.000-05:00

Dispatches from the frontline of the ever expanding global village: First, from the Economist, an article about the economic turnaround Brazil is experiencing strikes a cautionary tone-government outlay shouldnt be increased to the detriment of international investors:

Non-financial spending by the federal government rose by 11% in real terms last year, with big rises in areas that do nothing to strengthen long-term growth prospects. Lula added workers to the federal payroll, one reason why spending on personnel rose by 5% last year. Keeping an old promise, he will raise the official minimum wage by 8% to 300 reais ($115) a month, which will push up the cost of publicly financed pensions and benefits by 4 billion reais a year, says Raul Velloso, a budget expert in Brasília.

[...]

Yet some Brazilians [which ones?-ed.] worry about what would happen if investors lose their current appetite for risk. They reckon the government should be moving to cut its debt more swiftly, allowing interest rates to fall. In a rare comment on budget policy, the central bank recently said that reductions in public spending [would] reinforce monetary policy in controlling inflation. The latest data suggest that the economy is already slowing, which may mean that the bank can soon stop raising rates.

The sagacious benevolence of the IMF is eternal. From the article-- which is entitled The dangers of tax and spend-- is this infectiously cute cartoon of Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva:

Over in Bolivia, President Carlos Mesa has stepped down as a result of the electorate-70% of which is constituted by indigenous, native Indians-agitating for economic and political recognition. From the Independent:

Faced with a national strike aimed at forcing international energy companies to pay much higher taxes, Mr. Mesa made what was seen as last-ditch effort to get his opponents to back down.

[....]

The former historian pointed the finger of blame for the crisis at Evo Morales, a coca farmer and leader of the populist Movement to Socialism (MAS), who he accused of turning the landlocked nation of 8 million into a "country of ultimatums".

Mr. Morales has led calls for a blockade stretching to every corner of the remote and isolated Andean country unless the government raises taxes on foreign energy companies exporting oil and gas to 50 per cent. The President has rejected the demand, saying foreign multinationals would take Bolivia to court, with disastrous consequences.

[....]

A regional analyst, Mark Schneider, from the International Crisis Group, said Bolivia was facing its "greatest crisis" in years. "The current issue may be drugs, gas or pipelines but the core is [respective] governments' failure to incorporate the majority of people into political life and it is coming back to haunt them," he said.

Globalization's discontents register their appeal.

Hyper-speed prediction-falsification

2005-03-08T22:03:00.000-05:00

Ealier today, Matt Yglesias commented on the problem of hyper-speed prediction-falsification with respect to an article by Reuel Marc Gerecht in the current issue of the Weekly Standard. It's apt that the same thing should happen to me also--even if only slightly. The Cavs beat the Magic 111-92.

The boy who was to be King.

2005-03-08T19:40:00.000-05:00

Don't mind me while I relish the perpetual decline of the once vaunted—and unjustifiably so—Cavaliers of Cleveland. Going into this year’s All-Star break, fawning stories about the transformation of the Cavs, helped by the young uber-star Lebron James, abounded. I'm not one for Shaundenfreud—though I’m always up for some good gloating—but during the Cavaliers distorted success many of my friends were heaping encomiums on the untested Lebron James. They marveled at his incredible maturity, his keen basketball intellect, and his superior statically production. I, however, only saw merit in his physical prowess—something he was blessed with; a “type-fact”, as Nietzsche would say.

It then occurred to me that this is all people really admire in the young man. All the hype, all the adulation seems to be predicated on his physicality—and, likewise, his youth. It’s like being captivated by a baby because it’s so young, or, more, topically, by Shaq for being extremely large, physically.

So, what then is the difference between Shaq and Lebron, you ask? Well, for one—actually, for three—Shaq has an NBA championship ring; three of them, to be exact. Lebron has none, and isn’t likely to win one until Shaq retires.

Thus, my particular problem with Lebron—the concept, not the person—is that expectations have already exceed what, unfortunately, he’ll ever accomplish. While Kobe still tries to create his own legendary mythology (slightly tarnished now, for obvious reasons) Lebron has yet to grope his way into the playoff and pay his dues. People should give this kid a chance to prove himself before anointing him or conferring on him any title fitting for a King.

The Cavs have been riding a six-game losing streak and appear to be discordant organizationally. Tonight, they play the Orlando Magic and will be hard pressed to prove whether or not they’re going to break out of the funk, or slip further into Eastern Conference obscurity.

It's the Guns stupid.... and the criminal background too.

2005-03-07T19:17:00.000-05:00

Colby Cosh has been nearly unflappable over at the Shotgun (a.k.a the echo chamber) and at his own site, ColbyCosh.com, following the fall-out that has attended the killing of four RCMP officers in Mayerthorpe, Alberta. An incredible conflation of the facts has been committed by Socon's (social conservatives) jumping, self-righteously, on the word marijuana as though it were alone the causa effectiva. Socon’s have neglected the fact that Mr. Roszko was "running a chop-shop for stolen cars", and handling something to the order of 20 grams of marijuana—hardly the type of weight worthy of being called a grow-op.

Even more, reactionaries from both ends of the political spectrum are eliding the body of evidence that is Mr. Roszko criminal record, which is indicative of his deviant pathology rather than reflective of the putative lax criminal penalties for operators of "grow-ops"—as if this incident were actually that one-dimensional.

Interestingly enough, Cosh is indefatigably burnishing his libertarian cred while dispensing forth on the merits of not only decriminalizing marijuana but legalizing and controlling the distribution of it—as it would deracinate the criminal-cartels from the process and prove fiscally salubrious for revenue strapped governments. Cosh draws the usual historical parallels between the flourishing of criminal syndicates during prohibition to the current state of our drug enforcement policy—the War on drugs, and whatnot—which is apt and instructive in light of the Mayerthorpe tragedy: criminal actors had an incredible economic incentive to bootleg alcohol since its criminalization both created a black market and inflated its price.

No doubt more ink will be spilled on the advantages and disadvantages of a more intelligent and contextually practicable drug (marijuana) policy. But the real issue, I think, that may avoid sober analysis is whether the four RCMP officers were prepared for what was to befall them that night? And, in a similar vain, whether people with the unsavory criminal background of a Mr. Roszko should register their weapons to a, let’s say, national gun registry —let alone own them.

Martha, Martha, Martha!!

2005-03-04T12:41:00.000-05:00

Martha Stewart was just released from prision today and one could be led to believe, with all the ridiculous fanfare, that she was, instead, wrongfully convicted and did not, in fact, lie to federal investigators. To clear things up, she did, in fact, lie to federal investigators. For the next five months Ms. Stewart will be under house arrest in her plush, $16 million dollar Katonah estate in New York -- during which time she'll have the opporunity to accessorize the electronic ankle braclet that will monitor her every move. In addition, she'll be developing an Apprenticesque network show for NBC.

It's hearting to see an ex-con so quickly intergate back into civil society. Naturally, the court of public opinion is all that truly matters for Martha, as it's incredibly unlikely she'll have a problem finding gainful employment because of her criminal record.( Although, SEC regulations my prohibit her from helming a publicly traded company.) Look for a softer more endearing Martha Stewart in the months that follow, as she rolls out a public relations blitz to re-brand her hard, brusque image. So, much like I predicted in December's Year in Review, Martha Stewart will soon become an American folkhero.

Blather

2005-03-02T22:52:00.000-05:00

I'd like to post something substantial and of merit but it seems too often that my posts and blogging in general have become a tiresomely derivative enterprise. Every once and again it strikes me—the mood—to actually write something of substance. This particular post is the exception. I'm writing merely to know if the blogging absence has resulted in literary atrophy. How can I know if my prose style has deteriorated since my last post? Generally I scan through older post to be either surprised by my witticism and prescience (remember when I wrote that the Pope would pass away sometime in May; although now it looks more likely he'll shut it down in March) or appalled by my rambling incoherence—present post excluded—and lack of formal structure (House of Saud, House of Bush review)

With other things on the go, and a gradualy increasing torpor to many things political since November 2, 2004, writing posts, let alone reading political blogs, has become a bloodless distraction. Lately I've been more interested in reading fiction (Philip Roth specifically) and playing chess. Otherwise, I'm finding it difficult to be excited about, says, blogging on Social Security or Mid-East democratization—though it appears that the latter has some optics of fruitfulness. This apathy also dovetails into another problem with Blog content—for me at least. A sizeable portion of my blogroll is of American provenance; consequently, a sizeable amount of my content is about American politics. American politics, its foreign policy particularly, inherently has the gravity of hegemony. I can no easier deny American political and economic dominance than I can disregard the physical laws of our cosmos.

That being said, as goes Washington and New York, so goes the political and social realties that exist and are managed, or conceded, in whatever way your ideological doublespeak characterizes, just a few blocks from where I hang my hat—I don’t actually hang my hats; I was trying to integrate that turn of phrase into my sparse repertoire.

Therefore, is it any wonder so many Canadian bloggers write about American politics? To be fair, prominent bloggers, who are usually small c Conservative journalists—Wells, Cosh, Radwanski, Steyn (Syndicated columnist; writes on topics Americana and Canadiana), ect.—write substantially on Canadian politics. But then again, isn’t that their job?

Essentially, of the Canadian bloggers that I’ve read, who aren’t salaried conservatives, only one generally writes on Canadian public affairs. Chris Selley’s Tart Cider offers irreverent commentary, if almost analogues to Cosh.

The conclusions I draw from this wholly unreliable sampling are that 1) some, if not most, of Canadian bloggers, who aren’t on the Can-West payroll, blog infrequently on Canadian politics; 2) of these bloggers, with the exclusion or inclusion of said Can-West employees, some, if not most, lean right politically, with respect to the content they imbibe and expounde from; therefore 3) some, if not most, of the bloggers in the Canadian bloggesphere(Canblog) are markedly small c conservative.

I think conclusions 2 and 3 have some interesting implications. First, as regards 2, and despite my professions of being a pragmatist, my platonic ideological convictions disincline me from agreeing with a majority of commentary imbibed and expounded by right leaning Canadian bloggers. This is not to say that areas of consensus don’t exist, or that intelligent and informed counter-commentary isn’t likely to be found. On the contrary, some of the most trenchant blog commentary, I’ve read, is from the Can-West claque.

As per conclusion 3, demographics trends such as education, socio-economics, and cultural and regional differences could explain the preponderance of right-leaning blogs in the Canblog. The more interesting question is why am I, a liberal politically, so familiar right-leaning Canadian bloggers? The easy answer is that I’m only familiar with the prominent ones—who write extremely well, I may add. The liberal bloggers that I do read tend to be American and far more ideologically centrist, even more conservative, than conventional Ontarian Liberals or federal liberals—which explains the lack of Can-con on my blog; and the evolution of my thought on the Iraq war. But I should qualify all that I have said heretofore by noting that on the margins of the Canblog leftist commentary on social and economic justice—proletariats of the world unite!— flourishes.

The point I’m trying to make is that much of my blog content is political and more or less international—if you consider the totality of it relates to foreign policy issues. When I get the chance, I’ll usual add the Can-con that catches my interest. In the interim, I’ll start trying to post general interest content, from which I can blather needlessly—without substance, without merit, and, hopefully, without peer

Gaffe-stepping

2005-02-18T03:54:00.000-05:00

Smooth political operator, eloquent orator, and man about town Stephen Harper is at it again. First it was poisoning the well with the "same-sex marriages will ultimately lead to polygamous marriages will ultimately lead to inter-species marriages" argument—which, I think, if unnecessarily, shifted the burden back onto progressives, a silly ploy since its primary intention was to muddle the debate.

(Conservatives don't actually care or aren't really worried about polygamy—in fact, I'd contend, especially with a peculiar evangelist strain of the western genus, that polygamy isn't all to ideologically disagreeable to Conservatives. These particular Conservatives just don't do the Same-Sex Liberal Cosmopolitan dance.)

This time Harper reached into the progressive grab-bag to use the Punitive Liberalism anvil. Naturally, he dropped it on his foot. In a speech to “kickoff” the coming PR tornado surrounding the same-sex debate, Harper criticized the Liberal’s government’s history on human rights, using the examples of the internment of Japanese and the turning away of Jews fleeing from Germany and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Harper said during the kickoff of the same-sex debate that the Liberals are hardly lily-white when it comes [sic] the protection of rights, noting that Liberal administrations were responsible for interning Japanese Canadians and for closing the borders to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

"Let us not forget, it is the Liberal Party that said 'None is too many,' when it came to Jews fleeing from Hitler. It is the Liberal Party that interned Japanese Canadians in camps on Canada's West Coast, an act which [former prime minister] Pierre Trudeau refused to apologize or make restitution for."

Understandably, a few people were less than pleased by Harper's comments.

"I don't think that the memory of six million should be exploited to political advantage today," said Harold Troper, a historian at the University of Toronto.

"And I don't think that human-rights [violations] of the past should be used to justify human-rights [violations] today."
Prof. Troper noted that Conservatives at the time did not speak against the policy.

"One could argue that if the Liberals were bad, the Conservatives at that time were either just as bad or worse.

Exactly what point is Stephen Harper attempting to make? That the loyal opposition was mute during these times of deplorable regard for human rights says as much of the Conservatives as it does of the Liberals—if not more. And now, when the debate turns to the extension of civil and legal equality rights to same-sex couples, the Conservatives aren’t mute. The Conservatives are sounding a clarion call for the restriction of civil and legal rights.

One must remember that the issue of religious marriage or ceremony isn’t at issue; religious institutions have never been and will not be compelled to perform ceremonies for same-sex couples: that issue is of their own discretion. The issue is whether couples of the same-sex are constitutionally deserving of the civil and legal benefits that flow from civil marriage—rights that they have been denied thus far.

Via. The Globe and Mail

Easy Love

2005-02-17T08:14:00.000-05:00

It's easy to feel boxed in by the standard psychological definition of Love; all the more so during this brief yet amorous month. But, as with most standard definitions, Aristotelian logic doesn’t cut the mustard. Writing in The Philosophers’ Magazine, Peter Goldie complicates our bucolic concept of love:

An emotion – such as Mary's being in love with Paul – is typically complex, episodic, dynamic, and structured. An emotion is complex in that it will typically involve many different elements: it involves episodes of emotional experience, including perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of various kinds, and bodily changes of various kinds; and it involves dispositions, including dispositions to experience further emotional episodes, to have further thoughts and feelings, and to behave in certain ways. Emotions are episodic and dynamic, in that, over time, the elements can come and go, and wax and wane, depending on all sorts of factors, including the way in which the episodes and dispositions interweave and interact with each other and with other aspects of the person's life, so that the complex array of interlocking dispositions can evolve over a long period. (Indeed, they ought to evolve; as the contemporary American philosopher Amélie Rorty nicely puts it, contradicting Shakespeare, love is not love that alters not when it alteration finds.) And, finally, an emotion is structured in that the emotion's unfolding sequence of thoughts, feelings and actions is narratable: it can fall into a kind of narrative structure.

Is it over?

2005-02-16T15:19:00.000-05:00

Is the NHL season over? It's hard to tell, even after Gary Bettman’s news conference in which he formally cancelled the 2004-2005 season. Huh? Yes, during his 1 pm new conference Mr. Bettman left open the possibility that the season could still be saved; this, of course, on the condition that the NHLPA accept the NHL's final proposal for a $42.5 million dollar cap.

Speculation is a buzz in this last hour before the Chief of the NHPLA, Bob Goodnow, is scheduled to speak at a press conference. The NHLPA has conceded on two points of negotiation, offering a 24% roll back in salaries and proposing a $49 million dollar hard salary cap. Whether the Players Association capitulates further on the hard salary cap is still an open question.

If the season is finally cancelled, the off-season will invite an interesting drama, as the NHL and NHLPA both seem steadfast in their position. Though, now that the NHLPA has considered playing under a salary cap, negotiation on this point may be fruitful, despite the likelihood of having to accept linkage —linkage meaning the cost certainty between revenues and player salaries.

Funnily enough, my roommate likened the labour dispute to an acrimonious relationship between obstinate lovers. Each party is unwilling to compromise on key issues that under-grid the viability of their relationship. A painful entente must be arrived at before the relationship can be practically engaged. If not, both parties, it seems, must move on—the players to Europe, the owners to replacement players.

Update: It's offically over.

Politics

2005-02-16T12:52:00.000-05:00

From today's Globe I hear that two Liberal bills were defeated last night. Although making promises to support the legislation, the Conservative party ended up joining forces with the Bloc and NDP to vote down two Liberal bills aimed at reorganizing the structure of the Department of Foreign Affairs. It's interesting to note that the opposition parties weren't necessarily at odds with the proposed substance of the legislation, instead they saw it fit to punish Liberal arrogance, contending that no real effort at parliamentary consultation was undertook. Nonetheless, since the vote wasn’t of confidence, the Liberals will attempt to reintroduce an amended version of the bill for a future vote.

I'm not sure what this means one way or the other. Either the Conservatives, through some last minutes chicanery, decided to show how tenuous the Liberal minority really is, thus acquiring a modicum of political leverage/capital, or the Liberals, disengaged and cocksure, did a pitiful job in lobbying, negotiating, and counting/courting secure votes. I'd have to concluded that it's a little from column A, a little from column B.

Rap Mogul, Drug Kingpin Surrender to Feds

2005-01-26T18:44:00.000-05:00

Best lede ever:

NEW YORK - The hip-hop label behind music superstars Ashanti and Ja Rule was part of a murderous criminal enterprise that protected its interstate crack and heroin operation with calculated street assassinations, federal authorities charged Wednesday.

Blogger Rules

2005-01-21T16:41:00.000-05:00

It seems like this blogging phenomenon is picking up steam. Not only are popular bloggers being pursued by corporate America for valuable advert real estate, a growing groundswell of opinion believes that bloggers should adhere to a set of ethics of conduct. Most notable of the concerns is the disclosure of interest.

If, for example, a prominent blogger is being paid consulting fees by a particular candidate or campaign—or even a company—and is, at the same time, blogging favorable for the candidate or campaign, the blogger should disclose to his or hers readership the nature of this relationship. But, I don't think bloggers necessarily have to be bound by objectivity if it's a personal weblog. There is an interesting piece here which speaks more expansively on this issue.

Tort Reform

2005-01-18T15:09:00.000-05:00

Tort reform is being breathlessly touted as one of the first things in need of fixing during a second Bush term. Democrats aver that house Republicans, at the behest of big insurance companies, are only moving to cap the rewards in medical malpractice cases to the limit liability of, and protect profitably for, these big insurance companies.

Alternatively, Republicans accuse Democrats of self-interestedly eschewing tort reform because, as they see it, Democrats are disproportionately supported by the Trial Lawyer lobbies—the same trial lawyers, evidently, who pursue frivolous malpractice lawsuits, which, in turn, force big insurance companies to raise insurance premiums. Squeezed from both sides are physicians who are being virtually run out of practice as a result of skyrocketing premiums.

A similar argument was forward by car insurance companies in Canada, claiming that rising premiums correlated with the jump in “soft tissue injuries”. Skeptics viewed the rise in premiums as evidence of something more obvious: Insurance companies poor investment portfolios in the wake of the 2000 tech bust and general market imbalance since 9/11.

What is one to think of this revelation? Are insurance companies raising premiums relative to the actuarial pressures of generous malpractice rewards? Would capping malpractice rewards—tort reform—reduce the premiums paid by physicians?

Judge Richard Posner—a monetarist, a classical liberal, and a University of Chicago Law professor (all the requisite conservative qualifiers)—contends that tort reform, capping malpractice rewards specifically, misses the point:

The relation between malpractice premiums and malpractice judgments is also uncertain. No doubt capping judgments, which is the principal reform that is advocated, has some tendency to reduce premiums, but perhaps not much, because there is evidence that premiums are strongly influenced by the performance of the insurance companies’ investment portfolios.
A better reform would be to permit, encourage, or even require insurance companies to base malpractice premiums on the experience of the insured physician, much as automobile liability insurance is based on the driver’s experience of accidents. That would make malpractice liability a better engine for deterring malpractice—which in turn would reduce malpractice premiums by reducing the amount of malpractice. Capping judgments, in contrast, would reduce the incentive of insurance companies and their regulators to move to a system of experience-rated malpractice insurance.

He goes on to add,

It is always important to distinguish between financial and real costs. Insofar as malpractice liability merely transfers wealth from physicians to (some) patients, aggregate costs are unaffected. The real cost of malpractice liability is limited to the cost of the actual resources consumed by such liability, principally the time of lawyers and expert witnesses (roughly half the total amount awarded in judgments goes to pay lawyers and expert witnesses), unless defensive medicine is assumed to cost more than its benefits in improving treatment outcomes. The real benefit of malpractice liability is its effect if any in deterring medical negligence; reducing that benefit would impose a real cost. Hence it is simplistic to assume that the total annual malpractice premiums paid is a good index of the net social cost of malpractice liability, or that measures to reduce those premiums by capping malpractice liability would result in a net improvement in welfare. To repeat, part of the premiums represent simply a wealth transfer from physicians to the patients who receive malpractice judgments or settlements paid by insurers. The part (roughly half) that pays for lawyers and expert witnesses should be understood as the cost of maintaining a system for increasing medical safety; the efficacy of the system could be improved, I have argued, by experience rating, but not by capping judgments.

In other News...

2005-01-18T00:50:00.000-05:00

And in a surprising move of self-restriant, from the network that brought you Who's Your Daddy?, Fox covers objectionable content.

Fox says it covered up the naked rear end of a cartoon character recently because of nervousness over what the Federal Communications Commission will find objectionable.

The latest example of TV network self-censorship because of FCC concerns came a few weeks ago during a rerun of a "Family Guy" cartoon. Fox electronically blurred a character's posterior, even though the image was seen five years ago when the episode originally aired.

Committed

2005-01-04T22:00:00.000-05:00

I'm in stiches. I just finished watching Committed, the new NBC comdey which is a blend of Seinfeld meets Scrubs. Though the comdey is sometimes telegraphic, its delievery is refreshingly irreverent.

The Buzz

2005-01-04T15:42:00.000-05:00

Apart from the interesting interview with the founders of Google, last Sunday's 60 minutes also introduced North American men to Aishwarya Rai, a Bollywood superstar reputed to be the world's most beautiful woman. Rai, for me at least, comes in a close third behind the Bronx born—Yale schooled—actress Joy Bryant. First, of course, is Toronto native, and McGill graduate, Mia Krishner. Nonetheless, here’s the buzz on Rai:

While Bollywood regularly pops up in buzz and is popular overseas, it hasn't made much of a dent in American pop culture. Almost all searches on Bollywood emanate from the major metros of San Francisco, New York, and Washington D.C. But Indian screen goddess Aishwarya Rai is adding some spice to searches by exporting her acting talents to Hollywood. Searches on the stunningly beautiful actress were up 328% following her appearance on 60 Minutes, where she discussed her career and future in film. Not surprisingly, Rai notches over 70% of her search audience from guys. Those who needed to see more of the glamorous gal sent searches on 'Pictures of Aishwarya Rai' up 366%. Her appearance on the venerable news magazine helped to raise the profile of her upcoming Hollywood debut, Bride and Prejudice. Searches on the upcoming Bollywood-Hollywood mash-up flick were up 45% -- proof positive that India's film industry is starting to merge onto Hollywood's busy freeway.

House Party

2005-01-04T11:29:00.000-05:00

"A house divided against itself cannot stand". This was the most prominent phrase in an Abraham Lincoln speech on June 16, 1858, accepting the Republican nomination for Senate (for the state of Illinois). Today welcomes the 109th session of Congress, and the house is divided—particularly the side that disproportionately houses the Republican Majority.

House Republican leaders last night abandoned a proposal to loosen rules governing members' ethical conduct, as they yielded to pressure from rank-and-file lawmakers concerned that the party was sending the wrong message.

The proposal would have made it more difficult for lawmakers to discipline a colleague for unethical behavior and would have allowed Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) to keep his post if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury that is looking into his campaign finance practices

The sudden reversal came amid growing indications of dissension within the GOP. Just before House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's office announced that the measures were being dropped, the chairman of the House ethics committee issued an unusual statement denouncing the leadership's plan.

Ethics rules that were instituted to avoid abuses of power—at a time when the Republicans were beret of it—are now being rescinded in light of the Republican majority in both the House and Senate. The ambitions of grandeur that many cocksure Republicans have recently acquired need not be constrained by rules—or ethics, for that matter. Simply take the example of Tom DeLay(R-Tex.)

The other proposed rule change abandoned by the Republicans last night would have negated an ethics rule that was used last year as the basis for admonishing DeLay three times -- for hosting a golf fundraiser for energy lobbyists before House consideration of the energy bill, for offering to endorse the political campaign of a lawmaker's son in exchange for the lawmaker's vote on Medicare legislation, and for enlisting Federal Aviation Administration officials to help track down Democratic Texas lawmakers who were trying to foil the redistricting plan.

Keep in mind, the rules aren't being changed as an exercise in moral correction; rather, the likelihood of DeLay being indicted have diminished considerably, leaving him the requisite wiggle room to rationalize his transgressions and remain on as House Majority leader.

Via. WaPo

Politics of Idenity

2005-01-04T01:25:00.000-05:00

Writing in the Critical Review (Vol. 14, Num. 2-3) Reihan Salam expounds thusly:

…asymmetries in identity and self-representation are very much a “dialogical process,” one that is intimately tied to privileges and institutions secured by the state; they are not autochthonous by any stretch of the imagination. Though cultural collectivities certainly can precede their political articulation, politicized and institutionalized cultural collectivities do not.

Though, for them to be politicized and institutionalized at all, they must precede the articulation of their existence. They become, once recognized and constructed—for a myriad of state-interested purposes—politicized and institutionalized not by the very articulation alone, but as a result of past grievances and an overall disconnection from the avails afforded, it is assumed, other cultural collectives.

Identity Politics founders on the contradictory principles that underlie liberalism: universal equality and the inviolable right to individual freedom. Yet, as is natural with the variety of human cultures, self-interested collectives fortify their inviolable rights to freedom, assuming that a standard of universal equalization is being actualized.

This, however, is not the case. Because, again, the variety of human cultures trends to a heterogeneity of outcomes and, therefore, a heterogeneity and hierarchy of rights to freedom and equality, cultural collectives outside the articulated realm of equality rights will inevitably agitate for particular self-interested concessions.

If Identity Politics are to be denied, it is on the supposition that a variety of human-cultural collectives are also to be denied, which, regrettably, is on the supposition that an ethnic/homogenous, rather than a civic/heterogeneous, national consciousness is more viable as an instrument of statecraft. This cannot be a realistic proposition given that it denies heterogeneity--a variable that is a priori to any honest discourse-theoretic.

Interesting Fact

2005-01-03T21:36:00.000-05:00

Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico were offered as war prizes to Mexico, by the Germans, if they declared war on the United States. Shortly after, on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson demanded from Congress a declaration of war against Germany. The days of neutrality were over and the U.S would enter the Great War.

The Ends of the World as We Know Them

2005-01-02T13:19:00.000-05:00

.....Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving.

What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve.

This is a portion of Jared Diamond's cautionary Op-Ed in yesterdays New York Times. Give it a read.

Crossfire 2.0

2005-01-02T13:05:00.000-05:00

I just got around to watching the October 15th Jon Stewart appearance on CNN’s Crossfire. I embarrass easily and usually avoid confrontational situations of all kind--unless of course it's vitally necessary to my integrity. In those moments when it's becomes necessary to stand athwart circumstances and declare "Stop", I am at my most tenacious and cogent. For Jon Stewart, however, he is, at those moments, clinically masterful. Although he strayed from his talking points on a few occasions, Stewart let it be known that Crossfire was hurting the American political discourse and dissolving the credibility of the once vaunted CNN. I think he may be giving them too much credit.

The Transcript of the show is here, and the torrent file (media file) is here, if you should be so inclined. This now gives me an opportunity to plug a post I wrote a while back on this particular issue: the continuing absurdity of Crossfire. Writing on this blog seven months earlier, June 16, I said this of the show:

In its new incarnation, Crossfire has rapidly devolved into a screaming match, pining dueling, crazed hot-heads against each other in what seems to be a battle to the death. Hardly shrinking violets, Tucker Carlson and James Carville have done great work in turning the once staid, cerebral political program into a third rate clown show.(Bob Novak and Paul Begala, the other hosts, are less brusque)

Even with time during the holidays to watch Crossfire, I just couldn’t stomach a whole viewing. But it’s still a semi-must-see for its sheer hilarity—and then grating annoyance, and then self-defeating irrelevance.

Year in Review

2004-12-31T13:24:00.000-05:00

[Disclaimer: Since this blog was created in April of 2004, some of the selections are from 03’ because my frame of reference, especially for things I found interesting, is expansive.]

As this year comes to a close and the New Year approaches, I though it’d be interesting to memorialize the things I found fascinating over the past year. Here now is the list:

Biggest disappointments of 2004

The whole tectonic non-sense that Joshua Marshall alluded to never came to fruition. I visit that blog with less frequency now, and plan on doing so in the New Year.

This shouldn’t be on the 2004 list but it was that much of disappointment: Matrix Revolution (2003). That movie was a huge letdown—and will be so for many years to come.

I’m a partisan, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise: The reelection of George W. Bush. But, at the same time, he’s great material.

Best Blog Posts of 2004

John Holbo psychologizing David Frum in this blog post is indispensable. He’s Dead Right. (Circa 2003)

Limited, Inc. on Chess and Sistani: Shakh Mat. Enough said.

(You’d think there’d be more blog posts I found good. But this is it. I’m not even going to plug one of my own blog posts.)

Best Books of 2004(One’s I read in 04’)

House of the Dead; by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A Problem from Hell: America and the age of Genocide; by Samantha Powers

American Pastoral; by Philip Roth

Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity; by Richard Rorty

Things to watch for in 2005

The American Scene’s Rehian Salam, a brilliantly witty writer.

Lasers and al-Qaida, seriously

SuperVolcanoes. via Bradford Plumer

An Israeli/Palestinian Peace?

Lofi indie rock, orchestral pop, post-punk post emo post-post-post genres of everything.

The stealth strength of weakness; bargaining from a weak position; the meek shall inherit the earth type-stuff.

The Pope dying sometime in May.

The Blog phenomenon loses its cult status when your mom gets her own blog and puts you on her blog roll.

Bush unwittingly turns into an American Revolutionary.

Emmy Rossum; Bio.

Cats.

Peanut Butter.

The collapse of the Greenback and subsequently the American economy, and subsequently the World economy.

Condi Rice comes out of the closet.

Celebrities murdering paparazzi.

Fox's hit show: When Celebrities fatally attack
The paparazzi.

Martha Stewart the folk hero.

Michael Jackson Reality Show.

French intellectuals become Pro-Bush. Seriously.

Flying cars.

Cellphones that are Ipods that are blueberry's that are ditial cameras that are digital camcorders that are DVD players that are laptops that are universal locators that are universal identification.

Love still being as sweet as it was the first time.

Happy New Year.

Tsunami

2004-12-30T23:06:00.000-05:00

I just now had a chance to see some incredible footage from amateur video: It's amazing. The continuous flow of water is staggering. At one point, the palm trees measuring at least twenty feet in height are lost from sight, submerged underneath a torrent of water.

On the Contrary.

2004-12-30T17:43:00.000-05:00

Dru Oja Jay’s December 18, 2004, article in the Dominion is persuasive to the point of irrelevance. His bone of contention deals with the Canadian Media's coverage of L’affaire Ukraine, in general, and it's tendentiously pro-Yushchenko reportage, specifically. While relegating true injustices like Haiti to the wilderness, which up until recently I hadn't fully appreciated, Canadian Media outlets have elided the unflattering portions of Mr. Yushchenko’s bio, attempting instead to prop him up as a champion for Eastern European democratic reform. Notably, Dru mentions this untoward fact frequently glossed over:

Yuschenko's ties to anti-semitic groups -- Ukrainian neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers -- and far-right partisans have gone similarly unreported. Some have speculated that antisemitic activity, which was strictly curbed by Yanukovych's government, could run amok under Yuschenko.

Dru’s piece agrees with a particular sentiment I've been holding for the last month: Where are all the Yanukovych supporters? I don’t thinks he’s been given the sympathetic ear Yushchenko has been lavished. His appeal to the Supreme Court for a recall vote won’t be realized, regrettably. I think the third time is a charm, since, as Dru points out, the first time my have been distorted in Yuschenko’s favor:

In the last two years, the Bush Administration spent more than $65 million helping political organizations in the Ukraine. Additional funds have come from George Soros, Great Britain, Canada, Norway and the Netherlands, according to the Associated Press (AP). The money was key to funding the exit polls that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results, which showed Yanukovych as the winner.

So, bucking conventional wisdom, maybe this second Ukraine election was a Western abetted fraud. And if it was, where do we stand? That Western Media Outlets were complicit in the construction of the Orange revolution and Western governments and International Organizations architects of the Orange revolution would be far more damning if it weren’t so patently obvious: They were complicit because they have political and financial interests flowing from the success of the Orange revolution. Dru’s piece is enlightening and similarly thoughtful; but one is left thinking “What’s the point?” Really, what’s the point?

Is He an Island ?

2004-12-30T15:54:00.000-05:00

I think this is an admirable Op-ed from David Holcberg of the Any Rand Institute, an admirable organization that espouses admirable principles and not so much supports admirable causes as sullies the intention behind admirable causes. The direction of foreign and developmental aid is one issue entirely; whether or not aid should be given at all is a non-starter: We give because we have empathy for human suffering.

(As to the direction of aid: e.g. in giving aid to Colombia the U.S has shown a “reluctance to attach specific political conditions to the hundreds of millions of dollars proposed to ... ostensibly ... combat drug trafficking [sic].” Whereas aid given to such squalid places like Sub-Saharan Africa may, under a particular Administration, be contingent on the promotion of “abstinence-only programs”, as opposed to programs that promote abstinence, sexual education, and, failing that, instruction on contraceptive use—programs of this comprehensive nature have been successful in East Africa, especially as is the case with Uganda. )

But I digress. As to the admirable that Op-ed, here are some of its more gracious passages:

The question no one asks about our politicians' "generosity" towards the world's needy is: By what right? By what right do they take our hard-earned money and give it away?

The reason politicians can get away with doling out money that they have no right to and that does not belong to them is that they have the morality of altruism on their side. According to altruism--the morality that most Americans accept and that politicians exploit for all it's worth--those who have more have the moral obligation to help those who have less. This is why Americans--the wealthiest people on earth--are expected to sacrifice (voluntarily or by force) the wealth they have earned to provide for the needs of those who did not earn it. It is Americans' acceptance of altruism that renders them morally impotent to protest against the confiscation and distribution of their wealth. It is past time to question--and to reject--such a vicious morality that demands that we sacrifice our values instead of holding on to them.

Next time a politician gives away money taken from you to show what a good, compassionate altruist he is, ask yourself: By what right?

I’m overcome with a sense of solidarity—the solidarity in the human condition that awakes in each of us empathy for the other. Nearly 120,000 human beings have tragically vanished from this large archipelago we call earth. Isn’t that cause for reflection on what it truly means to be a citizen of the world, on what it truly means to see ourselves as part of a larger project, on what it truly means to have an interdependent global market that is inversely affected by tragedies of this magnitude? Events cast longer shadows than are perceptible to us at the time. Let’s not act as though altruism now won’t have its benefits in the future. David Holcberg is admirably a douchebag.

Via Truthlaidbear.

Weird, Wild Stuff

2004-12-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

I couldn't really take this seriously when I first read it; but then I reflected for a moment: This is some serious stuff if the people perpetrating the act are doing so for nefarious reasons.

Authorities are investigating a mysterious laser beam that was directed into the cockpit of a commercial jet traveling at more than 8,500 feet.

The beam appeared Monday when the plane was about 15 miles from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the FBI (news - web sites) said.

"It was in there for several seconds like (the plane) was being tracked," FBI agent Robert Hawk said.

The pilot was able to land the plane, and air traffic controllers used radar to determine the laser came from a residential area in suburban Warrensville Heights.

Hawk said the laser had to have been fairly sophisticated to track a plane traveling at that altitude. Authorities had no other leads, and are investigating whether the incident was a prank or if there was a more sinister motive.

Even more, that law enforcement has been unable, thus far, to locate the origins of these lasers and the whereabouts of these perpetrators isn't anything to look at ironically. If the conspiratorial gears are grinding and the seditious chatter falling into abeyance, then these lasers—if they are not puerile gags by puerile minds—portend something much worse.

A memo sent to law enforcement agencies recently by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department says there is evidence that terrorists have explored using lasers as weapons. Authorities said there is no specific intelligence indicating al-Qaida or other groups might use lasers in the United States.

In September a pilot for Delta Air Lines reported an eye injury from a laser beam shone into the cockpit during a landing approach in Salt Lake City. The incident occurred about 5 miles from the airport. The plane landed safely.

I find it disheartening that very little reportage has been dedicated to this possible terror tactic; although, at the same time, I appreciate the need not to whip up irrational fears in the public writ large.