05w10:4 Darren O'Donnell's 'A Suicide-Site Guide to the City' Posted March 9th, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 10 number 4 (Darren O’Donnell’s ‘A Suicide-Site Guide to the City’) Because this good read is unusual, it needs a bit of an introduction, especially for people outside of Toronto. Darren O’Donnell is a local playwright who’s currently showing his latest work, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City which I reviewed here, and if you read that you’ll see that I really loved the work. Darren performed it last year at the Edinburgh Fringe, during which time he kept a blog (here) and which he’s updated during the Toronto show with a link to a discussion he had with a friend of his named Stef Lenk on her blog. This good read is that discussion, but because it was all very direct and unformatted, I got Stef’s permission to put it up so that I could clean it up for readability. There you will find a link to the original, where you can contribute, continue, and catch up on more recent postings. While for obvious reasons being highly Toronto-centric, this discussion focuses on the problem of what it means to be creative in North America. Are artists being exploited? Are they lackey’s for the status quo? These are questions Darren attempts to raise with his play and attempts to get at in this highly, must-readable discussion. It is frankly one of the most sane and considered things I’ve read in a long time, and insightful in ways that most articles and press fail to be. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Ex-lefties and Suicide-site Guide to the City | Stef Lenk, Darren O’Donnel et al http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/x-lefties/ “[O’Donnell writes] You : ‘the Us vs. Them scenario is getting us nowhere’. Okay, well, I’ll tell you what. If you can arrange it so I can spend some quality time with one of the world’s 300 billionaires so I can really understand where they’re at then I will consider changing my position. If you can get me into one of their gated communities so we can have a heart-to-heart then I will really open myself to this person. Let me know. I’m busy until the 20th but after that I’m free. […] [Barker writes]There is an enormous potential to have a positive impact on the lives of our community, and our peers (as you identify them) through our artwork, action and example – but it is more the maturity we express as people and citizens, then as artists, that will determine that impact, peer-to-peer. We have some social power, with power comes responsibility, our social power is ours to use or misuse. But artists seem to have a tendency, at least in our subculture, towards self-centredness – perhaps no more, or no less than other kinds of subcultures – but it is the particular ways in which it is expressed in the art scene that makes me a little doubtful of the potential for rallying to goodness around the identification as artists. In any case, I don’t have any real disagreement with the opinions expressed here, just alot of personal frustration with some tendencies in my peer group! I’ll freely admit to that!” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 09 March 2005 @ 10:36 PM
05w10:3 The RCMP Thing Posted March 8th, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 10 number 3 (The RCMP thing) ——————————————————————— The RCMP, Grow-ops, and Psychopaths | Timothy Comeau http://tinyurl.com/6p2ll “In the overblown media coverage though, no one has pointed out how unique a country we are where 4 deaths is a ‘national tragedy’. And the grow ops thing – heck even my dad sees the similarities between this type of gunslinger madness and that of the dirty 30’s prohibition. Which also reminds me of Darren O’Donnell’s concerns about the incarceration rates of the United States, which he brings up in his play, A Suicide Site Guide to the City. The United States today puts a greater percentage of its citizens in jails than any other country in the world. A majority of these are drug charges, and most of the people in jail are black. Forget everything you think you know about why that is and consider this…” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 08 March 2005 @ 2:02 PM
05w10:2 Michael Ignatieff Posted March 8th, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 10 number 2 (Michael Ignatieff) ——————————————————————— Speech to the Liberal Convention | Michael Ignatieff http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/lectures/ignatieff/ “I put national unity at the centre of our project as a party and as a people. But it matters not just to us. It matters to the world. This is something I see from afar. From afar, we’re a very special and precious experiment. We’re an experiment as to whether a multicultural, multilingual society can survive and prosper. If we can’t do it, ladies and gentlemen, no one else can. And the future of all multiethnic multicultural societies will be grim indeed. That’s why there’s a global stake in us getting this story right. We are a ray of light in a gloomy world, a ray of hope in a world which is in fact ravaged by intolerance and by hatred. Let’s get it right. The world does look to us, the world does ask us, ‘get it right, show us how’. Communities of difference, communities of different languages can live together, can forge a unity together. You’re doing it in this hall tonight but never forget that we truly are a light unto the nations, and we must never forget that in the daily life of our politics. Now, there are countries to the south of us that believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And these countries that shall remain nameless want to export freedom and democracy to the world. And because we’re Canadians, we’re skeptics. We don’t like rhetoric that’s that high flung. We got some doubts about the project. We have doubts about the American dream. Ok. But let’s remember that we have a dream. Because we are the people of peace, order, and good government.” transcript of the audio Smart Guy, Eh? | John Geddes http://tinyurl.com/6vxfn “Michael Ignatieff is used to being admired in his native Canada, not to mention envied. His genre-leaping successes as a writer and broadcaster — reporting from hot spots in books and documentaries, defining the legacy of a major 20th-century political theorist in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, and even making the Booker Prize short list for his novel Scar Tissue — rank him among the most influential Canadian thinkers. And it doesn’t hurt that, at 56, the former BBC talk-show host retains his made-for-TV looks and effortless eloquence. But these days Ignatieff is coming in for as much criticism as adulation on forays back to Canada from his day job as a human-rights professor at Harvard University. The issue that has driven a wedge between him and many of his Canadian fans: Ignatieff was arguably the most prominent liberal supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.” Mcleans Magazine profile, June 2003 —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 08 March 2005 @ 12:22 AM
05w10:1 Robert Thurman on Anger Posted March 7th, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 10 number 1 (Robert Thurman on Anger) Now that winter is beginning to fade, Renaissance (that is, re-birth) metaphors begin to seem appropriate. In Michael Ignatieff’s speech to last week’s Liberal Convention (upcoming on Goodreads) he spoke of Canada being a ray of light to a gloomy world. The world, immersed in a metaphorical winter of cold hearts, gloomy and dark, seeks the light of a metaphorical summer. But we’re all awash in various forms of anger, anger that’s broken down into a discussion of Us vs. Them, and everyone, always and everywhere, sees themselves united through blood, culture, skin colour, and common dreams into some kind of Us. All the anger in the world towards injustice certainly exists for a reason, but let’s consider how we deal with our anger.To this end, I want to bring you this link to a conversation between Michael Enright and Robert Thurman, the Buddhist scholar, that aired last month on CBC1’s The Sunday Edition. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Robert Thurman on Anger | The Sunday Edition http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/media/thurman_se050220.ram “Enright: You say that, especially in the West, that our mythology, our culture, our movies, television, whatever, we valorize anger. Why do we do that? Thurman:Well, my reasoning there is historical- that we, unfortunately became, especially lately, the past 500 years, we’ve become very addicted socially to militarism. Ever since, in Northern Europe, monasticism was rejected in the Protestant Reformation, and all of human life energy and male life energy was therefore devoted to some form of conquest and aggrandizement, either industrial conquest of resources to develop endless wealth or the physical conquest of other countries, or you know, colonization, imperialism. We became militaristic, like the American ‘superpower’, right, that whole thing. Therefore, a culture that is very dedicated to materialism upholds military virtues. You know, we forget that the Illiad and the Achilles story is a kind of Rambo story and elevate Rambo and Arnold, you know, this kind of Terminator and things like that in the violence of our media, we play football in our colleges, you know team work and crush the enemy. All of this is part of a conditioning to militarism… “ Real Audio file, 27:24 min —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 07 March 2005 @ 8:00 PM
05w09:2 Future Followups Posted March 1st, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 9 number 2 (future followups) ——————————————————————— Future Feed Forward http://www.futurefeedforward.com/futnews.php Thanks to Dana Samuel for letting me know about this. Ten Years Later | Richard A. Clarke http://www.bmezine.com/temp/clarke.htm “It is a great honor to be chosen to give this tenth-anniversary lecture. This year, more than at any other time since the beginning of the war on terror, I think we can see clearly how that war has changed our country. Now that the terror seems finally to have receded somewhat, perhaps we can begin to consider the steps necessary to return the United States to what it was before 9/11. To do so, however, we must be clear about what has happened over the past ten years. Thus tonight I will dwell on the history of the war on terror.”This appeared in The Atlantic in January, and is archived on this blog. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 01 March 2005 @ 6:40 PM
04w09:1 The Gates Roundup Posted February 28th, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 9 number 1 (The Gates roundup) ——————————————————————— The closer you got, the worse it looked | Sarah Milroy http://tinyurl.com/5j6vm “By any estimation, as an intervention into public space, The Gates must be measured a triumph, unleashing a frolicsome joie de vivre in the direst depths of winter — no mean feat. The vibe even swept over the 49th parallel to engulf our own northern breed of pale, thin-lipped hibernators, many of whom migrated south en masse to check out the great event. […]What has been revealed in New York over the past few weeks is that Christo and Jean-Claude are brilliant strategists, passionate advocates for freedom of expression, with an unparalleled ability to mobilize the public behind an idea. But they are not strictly speaking sculptors, in the traditional sense of being form makers. Their wrapping and draping projects have been great because they adhere to, and enhance, three-dimensional forms that exist already. The artists then lay claim to these forms, designating them as things of beauty, drawing our attention to their historical or topographical resonances, and setting them alight with shimmering fabrics as a way of declaring their transcendence, and the transcendence of the human imagination. These works are works of genius. The Gates, alas, was something rather less.” With $3.50 and a Dream, the ‘Anti-Christo’ Is Born | Sarah Boxer http://tinyurl.com/4jcnp “You’ve seen Christo’s ‘Gates’ in Central Park. But what about Hargo’s ‘Gates’ in Somerville, Mass.? Sure, Hargo is unabashedly riding on the coattails of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. But it did take him some time to make his gates: 0.002 years, he estimates. That’s a good chunk of a day. You may as well take a look: not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm” Gated | Peter Schjeldahl http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/050228ta_talk_schjeldahl “Of course, ‘The Gates’ is art, because what else would it be? Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem, but not in Central Park, not this week. What the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been doing for three and a half decades is self-evident. They propose a grandiose, entirely pointless alteration of a public place, then advance their plan in the face of a predictable public and bureaucratic resistance, which gradually comes to seem mean-spirited and foolish for want of a reasonable argument against them. They build a constituency of supporters, including collectors who help finance the project by buying Christo’s drawings and collages of it. What then occurs is like an annual festival – Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a high-school prom – without the parts about its being annual or a festival. It feels vaguely religious. The zealous installers and minders, identifiable on site by their uniforms and chatty pride, are like acolytes. As with any ritual – though ‘The Gates’ can’t be a ritual, because it is performed just once – how people behave during the installation is what it is for and about. Then it’s gone, before it has a chance to become boring or, for that matter, interesting. “ The Gates on The Daily Show | The Daily Show http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/commentary/2005/02/gates-on-daily-show.html “Simply put, The Gates is a triumph Jon, an artistic milestone that may finally put New York on the cultural map. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here Jon, but I think this may do for the Big Apple what The West Wing has done for Washington DC, or what the band Asia did for that continent.” Conceptual Advertising | Timothy Comeau http://blogto.com/arts/2005/02/conceptual_advertising/ “In yesterday’s Globe and Mail [Simon Houpt wrote] ‘The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,’ writes Houpt, ‘I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art. […] He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, ‘Are they advertising that fabric? ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot’. ” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 28 February 2005 @ 2:54 PM
05w08:4 Canada Council Roundup Posted February 23rd, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 8 number 4 (canada council roundup) Because it’s Budget Day in Canada, seems apropos to revisit the proposed changes to the Canada Council, since after all, it’s all about Ottawa’s money, and it coincides with Monday’s publication in the Globe and Mail of an article by Kevin Temple on the subject, which he’s allowed me to reproduce on the Goodreads site. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Marketplace will dictate Canada Council funding, artists say | Kevin Temple http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/kevintemple/ “Nothing puts knots in the smocks of the country’s artists like messing with the Canada Council for the Arts. The current twist – a proposal from the visual-arts section of the Council that fundamentally changes the way it funds individual artists – caused confusion last fall and set off an outburst of blogging, e-mailing and petition-signing in the art community bumptious enough for the Council to reconsider its plans”. Note: there are additional related links on the page National Consultations with Visual Artists | The Canada Council for the Arts http://www.canadacouncil.ca/visualarts/rx127512282596987500.htm —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 23 February 2005 @ 12:46 PM
Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence Posted February 22nd, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 8 number 3 (Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence) ——————————————————————— Religion and Violence | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/lectures/taylor/rel_violence04.html “Religion and Violence explores the complex relationship among modernity, religion, and categorical violence – namely, violence directed against people on the basis of their belonging to a certain category or group. Professor Charles Taylor will discuss the rising tide of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism, and ask what connection this phenomenon has to modernity.” Note: I went to this lecture in November, and these are the notes Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence | The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/media/taylor_se041128.ram Real Audio file on the above lecture, recorded a week later (48.53min) —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 22 February 2005 @ 4:09 PM
05w08:2 Award This Posted February 21st, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 8 number 2 (award this) But first, the news:Blogto.com is a new website dedicated to the city of Toronto and being better than the Torontoist (so cute it makes Antonia Zerbisias want to hurl), and for which I’m writing for. Last week I posted about the Untitled Art Awards, and last night I found the article on literary prizes on the This Magazine blog, and hence, I saw a theme. So, ‘On Awards’ via the blogosphere and shameless self-promotion. As well, Jennifer McMackon is running a new series of submitted questionnaires. I sent mine in on the weekend, which you can check out here, the questions running as previous posts to that entry. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Fiction as a winner-take-all market | Andrew Potter http://blog.thismagazine.ca/archives/2005/02/fiction_as_a_wi.html “I’d like to see someone start a prize that comes with zero dollars attached. Not even a medal or a trophy. You just get some cheapo certificate, like you got in grade 6 for having perfect attendance or something. The trick would be to make it such a prestigious prize, that the very notion that mere money would accompany it would be offensive.” The Untitled Art Awards | Timothy Comeau http://tinyurl.com/4kh6k “Art awards like this are merely props to support a status quo, an attempt to create a monolithic cultural identity, which is unwise, especially in a city as diverse as Toronto. It’s also unwise since monolithic cultural identities are games that Empires play, empires like USA and it’s Greek tutors, the Brits. It doesn’t fit Canada at all, and seems like another example of the Canadian streak of insecure provincialism.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 21 February 2005 @ 3:07 PM
05w08:1 Paris Hilton Antoinette Posted February 21st, 2005 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 8 number 1 (Paris Hilton Antoinette) You may have heard about this Paris Hilton thing … about her cellphone getting hacked over the weekend, and all the details (including celebrity phone numbers, her email, and photos) have been posted on the web….the invasion of privacy thing might have some weight if they weren’t always trying to sell us stuff and convince they’re so godamn special. Besides, she’s wicked (see reading #2). So, it’s with pleasure that I do my part to bring the world this magic link. – TimothyPS: Who knows how long it will be up, so if it’s gone by the time you check it, apologies. ——————————————————————— Somebody got hizacked | Anonymous http://www.sunroad.pe.kr/paris/ We’ll never have Paris again | Lloyd Grove http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/264804p-226754c.html “The arc of Paris’ ‘career’ – from rich, witless party girl to rich, witless party girl with a hit television show – is an insult to the American sense of fairness: the idea that you get ahead by working hard, playing by the rules and acquiring a skill of some sort. Paris has bothered with none of the above, and yet society continues to reward her with money and fame. The British actor Stephen Fry put it best when he observed recently to Lowdown that being Paris ‘takes a startling vanity, an enormous lack of selfknowledge and a huge amount of greed and desire.’ What is it about this otherwise unremarkable 23-year-old that can provoke such seething outrage? Let me count the ways….” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 21 February 2005 @ 1:33 AM
