From Metafilter (2006-03-22): “Превед! Russia’s newest internet craze involves a painting called Bear Surprise [NSFW] by New York artist/musician John Lurie. “Превед”, or “preved”, is an intentional misspelling of “privet”, or “hello” in Russian. There’s a month-old Livejournal community dedicated to the meme and even a branded range of condoms. [Via freewilliamsburg.com]”
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 29, 2007; 8:37 PM
NEW YORK — Leona Helmsley’s dog will continue to live an opulent life, and then be buried alongside her in a mausoleum. But two of Helmsley’s grandchildren got nothing from the late luxury hotelier and real estate billionaire’s estate.
Good Reads Mailing List |2007 week 36 number 1 (Gore Vidal)
Things change. Goodreads as a website will be updated more frequently. I won’t be sending out an email for everything that goes up on the site – the email list might continue as a weekly or monthly digest of updates or I may stop using it entirely, we’ll see. It’s just I’m coming across stuff worthy of posting on a more frequent basis right now and it would be easier for me to post them right away – like any other blogger – than continue on something that began in the pre-RSS days, and when Goodreads was only meant to be an index of article links and not a blog.
Also, for the first time ever I exceeded my allowable bandwidth, resulting in an extra charge to the account. This is entirely the fault of offering downloadable audio. Now more than ever I’d appreciate a donation if you’d like to offer one.
Dear Timothy,This email is in regards to the domain goodreads.ca.On Saturday September 1st, 2007 from 7:30am to 8:30am (GMT -7:00) emergency power maintenance will be carried out in our data center. During this 1 hour maintenance window all services will be inaccessible for up to 1 hour. This includes all website and email access.
This GR is celebrating the digitization of some notebooks, particularly those of Leonardo Da Vinci, a hardcopy of which is now viewable at the Art Gallery of Ontario over the summer. This notebook (Codex Forster I) having achieved Da Vinci’s dream of flight to arrive here from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last visited our city when it was exhibited at the ROM during the summer of 1998, where I first got the chance to see it. Going by the poster and mismemory, I thought the AGO was exhibiting the same spread as the ROM had, and yet, through one of the links below, I was able to remember correctly and see that the AGO is exhibiting pages 6v|7r while the ROM had shown 15v|16r. Further, the ROM had kept the pages open with a clear vinyl strap, whereas the AGO has the book displayed in an angled cradle, in its own illuminated box, beneath a piece of glass without a transparent vinyl holder. At the AGO it is accompanied by a flash animation (‘Geometrical Solids’), which can aslo be accessed at the same link.
Secondly, a section on commonplace books, the old name for what we now call notebooks, or as some have argued, blogs. This selection was inspired by hearing Anthony Grafton’s wonderful lecture on the Slought Foundation website, which is there available as an AAC file, and which I’ve also made available as an MP3.-Timothy
e-Leo | Biblioteca Leonardiana http://www.leonardodigitale.com/login.html
// sign in (‘accedi’) with user: goodreads pass: goodreads and then click on `sfoglia i manoscritti` and the chose the notebook from the left hand menu (`Madrid I, Madrid II, and Atlantico)
Commonplace Books
Literary Honeycombs: Storage and Retrieval of Texts
Before Modern Times | Anthony Grafton AAC file (from Slought Foundation) MP3 file (Goodreads Mirror)
Commonplace | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace
“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests”.
Long S | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
The long, medial or descending s (Å¿) is a form of the minuscule letter ‘s’ formerly used where ‘s’ occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example Å¿infulneÅ¿s (“sinfulness”). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.
Good Reads Mailing List |2007 week 26 number 1 (a variety of links lunk and thoughts thunk)
An overview: Since the last Goodreads arrived in your inbox,
Rob Labossiere was kind enough to review the first of my Timereading Series, Outdoor Air Conditioning on Sally McKay’s blog (but I had nothing to do with the gun-cock-cop)
I felt the need to comment on the recent Luminato festival over at my blog.
Commentator LM asked last week (at Jennifer MacMakon’s Simpleposie) why I wasn’t included in the recently opened MOCCA show featuring disagreeable artists, since I (along with Eldon Garnet and Thrush Holmes) piss off and irritate lots of people.
I also found time to contribute to the discussion on Sally McKay’s thoughts on the Toronto art-scene here (but I wish she could have deleted my accidental dupe).
In blog news, after surviving cancer, Cedric Caspesyan has apparantly realized life is too short for the art-world’s mean people, Chris Hand’s Zeke’s Gallery blog has been apparently sued out of existance (and yet, the ads remains) and Franklin Einspruch doesn’t plan to update his blog until the Fall.
Meanwhile, three Canadian soldiers died last week prompting the City of Toronto to reverse the decision to remove the stupid ‘support our troops’ decals on firetrucks and ambulances in favor of leaving them on indefinitely since pacifists are still considered more loathsome in our society than the people who actually volunteer to kill. And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider that Afghani President Hamid Karzai was shown on the CBC news last Saturday night complaining about NATO’s heavy-handed tactics of ‘shelling a village from thirty-some kilometres away’ and killing civilians in the process (ref video clip here; CBC related here and here).
The report went on to say that as of Saturday, (23 June) 90 Afghan civilians had been killed in the previous ten days. Notice that this report was buried on the Saturday 11 o’clock news, and that when things like this are reported, suddenly it’s the problem of the ‘NATO coalition’ and Canada’s pride at the fact that the Cdn forces are the ones doing most of the heavy-lifting in the region is obfuscated. But we have to support the troops, or keep our mouths shut otherwise, and ignore the ratio that 3 Canadian lives are worth more to our conscience than the 90 or so people who were alive at the beginning of the month, whose names and faces we will never know, and who ‘we’ are not supposed to be there to accidentally kill but rather to accidentally help, through what could be called ‘aggressive peacekeeping’ in the bullshit lingo of the military.
I also write this in light of seeing last April the Frontline Worldreport (video available on July 9th) on the Canadians in Afghansistan, which prompted commentator Alex March from Edmonton to say: ‘I am afraid the Canadians are treating the Afghanistan people with a combination of traditional Department of Indian Affairs false promises and CISIS paranoia. Sad it will cost many lives unnecessarily,’ with a rebuttal by one of the soldiers Mr. Annoymous, who tells us the reporters did what they typically do, which is to obfuscate and simplify, which of course prompted a response by the filmmakers … and… on and on, the cycles of animosity never do end to they?
Andrew Cash wrote about the decals in Now Magazine during the first week of May, notable to me for including this facile sentence indicative of the whole problem of the ‘support the troops’ sloganeering (people choosing stock phrases rather than a conscious awareness of what they’re saying): ‘Who among us isn’t deeply saddened by the news of ever increasing numbers of uniformed Canadians killed or seriously injured in the war.’ I stand up to say I am not deeply saddened because I don’t pretend to be an idiot out of social convention. Out of a population of heroin users I understand some will turn up as corpses with needles hanging from their tourniquet arms. Similarly, I understand that some soldiers going to war zones will come home in body bags. Why should I feel upset about either when it’s continually presented to me as a fact of the world that no one seems to have any intention of changing? If we do want to change it, how about we start by stopping the rhetoric and unquestioning support of militarism? Therefore, I don’t support the troops.
The Human Union
I found this when I was researching the Human Network links below, although I have to ask, why do progressive websites often display such poor design?
From ‘The Human Union Declaration’ found on the site:
To force me to act in compliance with a political system that goes to war against my fellow humans is a denial of my humanity and I will resist such efforts to the best of my abilities.
To force me to act in compliance with a political system which discriminates politically against my fellow humans is a denial of my humanity and I will resist such efforts to the best of my abilities.
The recent anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre prompted PBS’ Frontline to rebroadcast their April 2006 documentary The Tank Man, which is available online at the Frontline website, in four parts. In the fourth and last part, Yahoo!’s complicity in facilitating Chinese censorship led into a report that Cisco Systems has sold the latest technology to China to enable such control of information. I laughed when I heard this, given how Cisco’s latest advert campaign, launched last autumn, announces itself as facilitators of ‘the human network’. Interestingly, their commercial features Toronto, leading to one of those WTF? moments – is it because we have the world’s largest communications tower? Is it because relational aesthetics is hot here? Nevertheless, the scene illustrating ‘welcome to a world where people subscribe to people and not magazines’ in which girls meet up in front of City Hall through coordinating on their phones inspired me somewhat. I like the idea of living in a city where people subscribe to people and not magazines. But I also have this sense that Goodreads has managed to blur the two – a subscription to a webzine/Mr. Timothy person. If only more people bought me diner….
Facebook banned for Ontario staffers | Robert Benzie http://www.thestar.com/News/article/210014 // it’s great how this story is illustrated with a picture of an old man
Art
The Art World by its nature is nepotistic. Jerry Saltz had a problem with that a few months ago:
Shakespeare: the Biography (Paperback) | Peter Ackroyd http://goodreads.ca/shorty/amazon/shakespearebio/ // I’m currently reading this biography of Shakespeare and it’s so so good. Yes, that’s two so’s for emphasis, not a typo.
In Search of Shakespeare | Michael Wood http://goodreads.ca/shorty/amazon/shakespeardvd/ // I saw this when it was first broadcast on PBS in 2004. It was so good I actually found it haunting. Especially the bit with the photographs. When I found the accompanying book later that year in a remaindered store, I of course bought it.
On Postmodernism | Noam Chomsky http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
“Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.” // Haven’t I sent this out before? If I haven’t, I always meant to.
The Norman Finkelstein Case
Dear Canadian Universities: you should hire this guy and prove that you’ve got more going on than the so-called superior American schools.
“It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There” — World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/09/1514221
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson Slams His Friend Mitt Romney for Flip-Flopping on Abortion, Stem Cell Research, Torture in Attempt to Win GOP Presidential Nomination http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/25/1421228 2007-06-25
Banned by Army: Folk Singer Joan Baez Can’t Sing to Wounded Soldiers at Walter Reed http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/04/1419207 2007-05-04 // Of course I feel the need to point out here that maybe the reason Joan Baez was uninvited to sing for wounded soldiers was not because of politics but because young hurt boys would probably prefer a Britany Spears tits-and-ass show than an ethereally voiced sixty-something ex-hippy.
A roundup of the Charles Taylor content I’m aware of, and which flourished after he won the Templeton Prize.
The Enright Files – A Celebration of Charles Taylor | CBC Ideas http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2007-05.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror]
Michael Enright, host of The Sunday Edition, in conversation with the Canadian philosopher, thinker and winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, Charles Taylor.
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.
Philosophy, spirituality and the self – Part 1 | The Philosopher’s Zone ABC Radio http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2007-04_p1.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror]
Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, has just been awarded the Templeton Prize, the world’s most highly endowed award for intellectual achievement. This week on The Philosopher’s Zone, he talks to ABC Radio National’s Tom Morton, about how we are intellectually and how we got to where we are.
Philosophy, spirituality and the self – Part 2 | | The Philosopher’s Zone ABC Radio http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2007-04_p2.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror]
Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, has just been awarded the Templeton Prize, the world’s most highly endowed award for intellectual achievement. This week, we hear the second part of his conversation with ABC Radio National’s Tom Morton, about how a moral view of the human self might be possible in an age of scepticism and neo-Darwinism. And Danny Postel, senior editor of opendemocracy.net returns to the program with news of Iranian dissident journalist, Akbar Ganji, who is touring the West talking to eminent philosophers and political thinkers.
Manuel Delanda Roundup
Since Darren sent me the link which I included in the last Goodreads (reproduced below) I found more Delanda stuff, which I quite enjoyed listening to at work, and which lead me to get his books, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and A New Philosophy of Soceity.
Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze | Manuel DeLanda http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/manueldelanda
wrote Darren: “here’s an interesting video of manuel delanda taking a trip through deleuze and it’s not all that confusing”
Manuel DeLanda, ‘Nature Space Society’ presented as the first Nature Space Society lecture at the Tate Modern, London, 05.03.04 http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/naturespacesociety/delanda.ram
DeLanda argues for a Deleuzian philosophy of nature. In the first half he rejects a sharp distinction between culture and nature. He demonstrates instead the direct interaction between the biological and social, citing examples from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, and Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism. We must dismiss social-constructivism’s obsession with language and cultural representation. In the second half, DeLanda argues that, in order to avoid this provincial anthropocentrism, we must be realists, but not essentialists. We must historicize nature, and replace ideas about ‘laws of nature’ with Deleuze’s singularities (special, topological points) and affects (the capacity to affect and be affected).(Real Video, 3 hours)
Good Reads Mailing List |2007 week 17 number 1 (roundup)
Hello. This is a roundup of some things I gathered in the weeks since I sent the last Goodreads. What else happened? I spoke at March’s Trampoline Hall on ‘Morality as a Form of Idealism’; I was a filler, since the first person scheduled got into an accident. This follows on me being on a panel discussion at the end of February when I was also made to feel like a filler, and so, it occurred to me last month that my career as a second-rate speaker appeared to be well under way. I hope to get up to first rate by the end of the year. If not, I’ll need to get a better agent.
There was also a big ceremony marking the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge. They couldn’t wait another ten years for a ceremony apparently, but they will obviously be jumping through those hoops again in a decade’s time. Now, a century marker, I could understand, by the 90th was just more propaganda to remind me that the Canada I knew and loved is being lost to patriarchal militarism and unquestioned loyalty to George Bush’s incompetent, ignorant, and colonial vision of global affairs.
There was also Easter and stuff … and well, I’m drawing blanks. This wasn’t meant to be too long. A bit of second-rate fill to the real text that belongs here which is:
Just in time for the Globe & Mail’s redesign to make it look as it would have looked in a 1980s science-fiction movie set in the 21st Century, featuring headlines ‘Earth Like Planet Found’ or ‘Kryponite Discovered’ or ‘Alberta building rocketship to rape new resource’ etc. – Timothy
Adam Curtis’ The Trap http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/adamcurtis/
// Adam Curtis’ latest documentary was broadcast on the BBC in March and has since been posted on Google Video. I added these to the Adam Curtis compilation page already present on Goodreads, with links back to the Google Video source, where they can be watched larger and downloaded. I loved this series – since 2001 I’ve thought the rise of a interest in religion had a lot more to do with American propaganda for a war against believers, non-believers and evildoers and all that, but this makes me think the real reason is a backlash toward the simple-minded view of human beings as self-interested economic agents, which is how we were supposed to think of ourselves throughout the 1980s and especially 1990s. People understand they are more complex than that, and so far, religion has provided a framework to encompass an idea of ‘humanity’ denied by trendy theories. I would also argue that art and literature also provides a complicated vision of human beings, but since the Humanities have been turned into a linguistic mush of critical discourse and over-heated arguments of resentment, people are defaulting to religion for their models and answers and attempts at understanding. But here, I don’t want to say one is better than the other. From my own experience, I feel the worst of religion is balanced by the best of Humanities, and the worst of the Humanities is balanced by the best of religion creating a complimentary relationship with one another, and any attempt at understanding the complexity of humanity should take into consideration what the best of both traditions of the imagination have to offer.
Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze | Manuel DeLanda http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/manueldelanda
writes Darren: “here’s an interesting video of manuel delanda taking a trip through deleuze and it’s not all that confusing.”
compare with this article, posted in Goodreads 04w06:2
Dangerrrr: cats could alter your personality | Jonathan Leake http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1161725.ece
“They may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities […] Infected men, suggests one new study, tend to become more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and are less attractive. Women, on the other hand, appear to exhibit the ‘sex kitten’ effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun-loving and possibly more promiscuous.”
Goodbye, Sanjaya, I Will Miss You! | Maureen52 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCndDgiokE
// One of the funniest things I’ve seen all week, and once again, a reminder of the obsolescence of video art and galleries in the age of iMovie and and YouTube.
McCain ‘sings bomb iran’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAzBxFaio1I
// If this counts as singing…what did he say after the edit? It seemed to be a way of re-phrasing the question, ‘when do we send an airmail message to Tehran?’ asked by a hawk in the audience.
This past week the lastest version of Ubuntu was released, a Linux operating system gaining popularity. It was named Ubuntu after the African philosophy:
Restoring the home of Nicephore Niepce http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAcTHpuqQIs
“It was in this house … that Niepce invented photography” // This ten minute documentary includes reattempts at the first photographs and I was fascinated to see the way archaeology was used to determine the exact position of the first camera to create the first images.
Black Tambourine | Beck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfUZCo-oLtM
//Bad experiences with Beck fans has biased me against him for years, although I do have his first two albums. When I saw this video while channel surfing (which, is like, a miracle considering music-video stations never play music videos anymore) I thought maybe I was over my bias.
Befriend an artist? Are you kidding? | Jonathan Jones http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,,1991391,00.html
Today’s critics have got too cosy with the artists they write about, says Jonathan Jones, kicking off a series of debates on the Guardian arts blog
Ten Lashes Against Humanism | Jorge Majfud http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5033/1/249/
“Not long ago, Doug Hagin, in the image of the famous television program Dave’s Top Ten, concocted his own list of The Top Ten List of Stupid Leftist Ideals. If we attempt to de-simplify the problem by removing the political label, we will see that each accusation against the so-called US leftists is, in reality, an assault on various humanist principles. ”
Confucius topples Harry | Steven Ribet http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=455372007
“It took Yu Dan only six weeks to topple JK Rowling and become the most successful author in Chinese history.But it wasn’t tales of wizards and magic that sparked hysteria in the world’s most populous country. The Beijing academic has managed to make the 2500-year-old words of Confucius, China’s most famous thinker, relevant in the 21st century. ”
President or King? | Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., and Aziz Huq http://goodreads.ca/shorty/law/kingpresident/
“Not even a seventeenth-century monarch was allowed to ignore checks on power the way President Bush has.”
In Other Words | CBC Ideas Podcast
Have you ever read Don Quixote? There are several English translations of it. Which Don Quixote was it? Or how about Anna Karenina? Unless you are fluent in the original languages in which these works were published, you’ve read them through the prism and sensibilities of that most underestimated of literary artists – the translator. Barbara Nichol discusses literary translation with some of its most gifted practitioners.
Flesh and Stone: The Sociology of Richard Sennett
The American sociologist Richard Sennett has had two great themes: the history and design of cities, and the organization of work. As a lover of cities, he has celebrated the expanded sympathy that urban life makes possible; as a student of work, he has criticized the fragmentation of time in the new capitalism; and as a writer, he has elevated sociology to a literary art. He talks with IDEAS producer, David Cayley.
The Ideas of Jerome Kagan
Harvard’s Jerome Kagan is a pioneer in developmental psychology. His specialty is studying children. He’s also a philosopher of his science. In a conversation with Paul Kennedy, Jerome Kagan reflects on nature vs. nurture, emotion and the quest for meaning.
Jerome Kagan: Freud made some very strong statements, for example: all children pass through three phases; an oral phase in infancy, an anal phase during the second year, a phallic phase, a genital phase … that all are neuroses, all are neurotic symptoms: insomnia, depression, fearfulness, they’re all a function of repression of our conflicted urges, primarily sexual. Now, none of that is true. So here’s the puzzle: why did so many (leave me out of it) why did so many brilliant, erudite, educated people not just in the sciences but in the humanities believe that? That’s the puzzle.And the only approach to an answer I can come to is that he spoke to the intuitions of Americans. I should point out that in the early part of the 20th Century, Europe was not very friendly to Freud, it was America and England. America and England were Protestant countries with a much more prudish attitude toward sexuality. And so here is my attempt at some sort of an explanation. The availability of cheap contraceptives toward the end of the 19th Century meant that young men and women could begin to think about sexual activity outside of marriage, otherwise you couldn’t, especially if you were middle class. So now you’re allowing these thoughts to bubble up, but there’s a lot of tension and shame and uncertainty about it. So it’s sitting right on the cusp of consciousness and creating a sort of tension and what I think happened was the tensions that are due to a sick child, losing your job, your parent having cancer, frustration with your boss … that all those tensions, which have nothing to do with sexuality were interpreted as due to the conflict over sexuality. That’s the only why I can understand why this idea – coincidentally, which I believed when I was 21 years old, I thought Freud was absolutely dead right …. dead right.
Paul Kennedy: It would be hard to believe anything else because that was the orthodoxy as you say.
Jerome Kagan: Yeah, but there was a minority of scholars who rejected it. I mean not everyone thought it was a good idea, but many people did. I’m sure the explanation I just gave can’t be all of it. There have to be other factors, but someone smarter than I will have to come up with it. But at least the explanation I just offered I think makes some small contribution. But it is amazing.
Good Reads Mailing List |2007 week 11 number 1 (The Fantastics)
The Fantastics of Ignorance
This Goodreads is in part of confession of ignorance, and how wonderful things can be when you don’t have the full picture. Which is to say, they’re fantastic when not dulled by the acquired cynicism of ‘an inside story’. And perhaps it is by coming to the experience initially ignorant, having that wonderful first impression, that the further nuance associated with it doesn’t diminish its glow.
Two of the items discussed here refer to art exhibitions on in Toronto presently, which is to encourage any of you for whom it is possible to visit them.
These four fantastics are presented in the order in which I experienced them.
I. Fantastic One | Darren O’Donnell at CCL1
Darren O’Donnell’s work over the past couple of years has been fantastic. His Suicide Site Guide to the City wowed me when I saw it in 2005, and apparently this was because of the ignorance mentioned above, as Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote in his review at the time ‘…only audiences who haven’t been to the theatre in say, a few decades, are expected to be dazzled by the presentation’. I admitted in my review that I was one of such an audience. Yet, how could we not appreciate Haircuts by Children or Ballroom Dancing for Nuit Blanche?
In an arts scene riven by competition and jealousies, Darren’s work is something that we all seem to appreciate without such pettiness. I recently attended the latest production from his theatre company, Diplomatic Immunities: THE END and was genuinely touched: Ulysses Castellanos singing Queen’s `We are the Champions` at the end of the show almost made me cry. This was the song voted on by children at a local school to be that which they wanted to hear at the End of the World. (My vote at the present time is either The Beatles’ `Tomorrow Never Knows` or `Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)` and as I listen to them nowadays I imagine it playing over the footage of this video.)
But what is it about Darren’s work along these lines that is so generally fantastic? For me it highlights what is perhaps a greater shift in our culture, which is a movement toward an interest in ‘real life’ (and to that end, reality-tv represents this transition, by using non-actors but still tying them to some sort of narrative structure). The work of Darren’s theatre troupe, Mammalian Diving Reflex, forgoes an explicit narrative structure and seemingly let’s that emerge on it’s own.
Here, I’m most inspired by a snippet of dialogue from a Star Trek show. In the Enterprise episode ‘Dear Doctor’ which first aired in January 2002, there’s a scene depicting movie-night on the starship; while watching ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ a 1943 film being shown in that time-frame of 209 years from its creation, the character Ensign Cutler asks the alien Doctor Phlox, ‘They don’t have movies where you come from do they?’ He replied, ‘We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discovered their real lives were more interesting’.
Now, imagine living on Phlox’s planet during that time of transition, when people were discovering their own lives were more interesting. Wouldn’t that time resemble our own, with diminishing box office returns, reality-tv programing undermining celebrity culture, a global communications network allowing for unedited dialogue within varying degrees of privacy, and the rise of the documentary genre in popularity?
This statement was typed out initially by a scriptwriter in Los Angeles at the beginning of this decade and perhaps was meant both as an inside joke to Star Trek‘s fanbase (Shatner’s ‘Get a Life‘ skit from his 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live) and reflecting the concern of Hollywood that they would lose their market. Three years later, Enterprise was cancelled, the only franchise since its resurrection twenty years ago to not last through seven seasons.
Leaving DI: The End four weeks ago I was convinced that our own lives were definitely more interesting. The performance incorporated an element of chance in its selection of two audience members during the course of the evening for interviews by the cast and attendees; on the night I was there, I was stunned by the answers given by the second girl chosen, who told us of saving the life of one of her friends during a climbing accident years before. Also, when asked a question along the lines of ‘why are we here’ she gave such an unexpectedly Buddhist/Eastern Tradition answer that I found myself saying ‘wow’.
The point made for me was that this girl, who had simply been someone sitting in the aisle in front of me, had a much more dramatic world inside her than anything I’m ever offered by fictional constructions, and I took this knowledge onto the street, walking with my companion who was someone new in my life and hence still full of mystery, and saw everyone around me with a new appreciation for our variety, our potential, and of the unknown masterpieces of real life.
This past Thursday, I attended Darren’s opening at The Centre of Leisure and Culture No. 1, Video Show for the People of Pakistan and India which consists of an approximately twenty-minute video and chapbooks of the blog Darren kept while on tour in Pakistan and India late last year. I’ve prompted Darren to place this video online eventually, and if and when that happens I’ll follow through with the link.
At the time of Darren’s trip, I was moved to contact CBC’s The Current because I’d recently heard an interview (begins at 7:45min) with the 24 year old Afghani woman Mehria Azizi who was doing a tour through Canada showing a documentary she’d made about women’s lives in her homeland. This had been one of the more insightful things I’d been exposed to with regard to this part of the world. I imagined Anna Maria Tremonti asking Darren about his conversation with Mike the soldier on the plane, or asking for stories from Darren’s experience with the humanity of these people. I figured it would have fit into The Current’s mandate as I understood it: to educate, to inform, to bring us perspective. Darren’s work deserved this national audience. There was a bit of a followup from someone who was going to forward the info to a producer but in the end nothing came of it. Meanwhile, due to the unreliableness of the CBC’s internet stream, and what I see as too much focus on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, I’ve avoided listening to The Current at work for the past couple of months, preferring instead France Culture or the BBC. I did catch the broadcast the other day of their self-flagellation on under and mis-reporting the story of Global Warming. Anna Maria was somewhat bothered by a statement of one of the scientists: ‘never underestimate the illiteracy of reporters’.
The following morning, (that of March 9th) the CBC included in its news roundup the visit by Canada’s Governor General to the troops in Afghanistan, and there was something said about ‘putting a human face’ on the story (mov and realmedia). What’s unfortunate is that Michaëlle Jean, who in the past has seemed an intelligent, well informed woman, was responsible for the stupidest statements in the report. ‘There’s no future without women …’. No shit. But perhaps the real fault lies with the editors of the video, or the fact that she used to be a reporter.
The evening before I’d been to Darren’s show to see the Pakistan video, the talk of putting a human face struck me as more this meaningless political rhetoric. Why are all these human faces those from Canada? Where do we ever see the human faces of the people we’re supposedly helping? How is their humanity ever brought to our attention? The fact that Darren could undermine the agenda of Canada’s national broadcaster with a 20 minute video perhaps suggests just how under-served we are by photo-ops, predictable rhetoric, focus on soldiers, and all the other regular bullshit. My understanding of the situation and of the people involved has been greatly enhanced by Darren’s first-person and personal reporting and the fact that the CBC found him fit only for their hipster-oriented Definitely Not the Opera kind of suggests how little they take his work seriously … something silly for the kids right?
II. Fantastic Two | Monks in the lab
I watched/listened to this video on Friday at work, and it was fantastic. I especially liked the idea that the effect of mediation was to practice (and thus grow new neurons) paying attention to autonomic processes, which allows us to have greater awareness of our emotions and perceptions, so that we do not need to find ourselves ‘out of control’ or ‘swept away’ by strong impulses. In my dream of the future, I want children to be taught meditation in kindergarten, as an essential life skill, just as much as doing your physical exercises and learning your maths.
As I’ve noted about Darren’s work, that it seems to miraculously inspire more admiration than jealousy, the work of Zin Taylor could be accused of inspiring more jealousy than admiration. Consider the facts as they appear: part of the Guelph university educated elite clique, he gets to be in show after show in prestigious galleries with work that is sometimes weak (the piece at The Power Plant in 2005 for example) and Taylor’s continual presence in the Toronto art scene PR seems to be attempting to break the record established by Derek Sullivan. Both artists appear to have been elevated to that collection of what seems like the less than ten artists who are overexposed in Toronto and who are continually asked to ‘represent’ this city of millions to others and to itself.
And so it was with ambivalence that I went down to the YYZ opening on Friday night; a chance to drink beer, be social, see some people I like to talk to and consider friends, and be ignored by those who used to say hi to me but now just think I’m an asshole or something. I wasn’t at all expecting Taylor’s video to win me over as it did, and it is now on my highly recommended list.
And yet, my appreciation for this work was based on my ignorance of its subject matter. I recall seeing years ago the call for submissions from the Yukon asking for artists to come on up and be inspired. I also recall hearing that Allyson and Zin, two artists I’d recently met through a friend, had been chosen to go. And so I knew over the past few years that Allyson and Zin had a connection to the Yukon and that they were making work about it.
With Put your eye in your mouth (which a friend suggested meant ‘digest what you see’) Zin has made a sort of fake documentary on a fake thing: Martin Kippenberger’s metro-net station in Dawson City. Now, my ignorance here was based on being familiar with Kippenberger’s name but not his work, so when watching the video, I thought Zin had seen this structure and made up an elaborate history for it, tying it to some art-star’s name in order to get in the trendy props to the masters. Turns out the Metro-Net was legit (also here), and yet this only diminishes by a bit the overall video, which is still fantastic. It is this type of elaborated imagination that I want to experience with art, and in as much that conceptual art usually goes for obscure one-liner cleverness, I hate it for its denial of the imagination. Now, considering Taylor’s background from Canada’s new conceptual It-School, I suppose I can say he’s showing that you can be both conceptual and imaginative, and the product is better for it.
IV. Fantastic Four | Kuchma’s Thrush Holmes reviews
The suspicions I had of Zin Taylor’s elaborate imagining of what could have been ‘the mine-shaft entrance’ follows on January’s suspicions that the opening of Thrush Holmes Empire was part of an elaborate joke.
There’s been talk in the scene of it being some kind of hoax, and personally I thought this was the case. I was trying to keep my mouth shut about it all, not wanting to ruin it, but now that I’ve been assured that this is not a masterpiece-parody on the art world constructed by Jade Rude and Andrew Harwood (the co-directors of the Empire space) (‘they’re not that clever’ I was told), I guess I share my disappointment that this really is the work of a presumptuous and pretentious young man who makes terrible work. As I said at the opening in January, ‘if this work is a parody, it’s a masterpiece, but if it’s legit I feel sorry for the guy’. In other words, in my ignorance, I imagined a fantastic scenario in which Jade and Andrew had collaborated on making quick, easy, and lazy work to fill up wall space in time for the opening, and hired an actor to play Thrush Holmes (which plays too close to the great 90’s indie-rock band Thrush Hermit). No mother names their son Thrush, so whoever this guy is, his wallet certainly doesn’t contain ID linking him closely with Joel Plaskett’s 90s project.
(A Thrush Hermit Aside
Seeing Ian McGettigan cover The Wire’s ‘I am the Fly’ in 1999 was part of the reason I gave up watching live music once I moved to Toronto – nothing would ever top that, and I prefer to have my indie-music memories packaged around my experience in Halifax rather than have continued on with the ringing ears of today’s stuff. Even though that meant I missed out on seeing the shit like this live).
The only person who seems to be addressing this Thrush Holmes issue is Michael Kuchma.
As I mentioned in the last Goodreads, I was part of a panel discussion at Toronto’s Gallery 1313 on art criticism. I had a good time and it was well attended despite being both a Monday and the weather being less than conducive to a social gathering. (The event was recorded and will potentially be made available as a podcast, and if/when that happens I’ll send out a link). During the Q&A, I was asked a question from a fellow in the audience who later identified himself via a comment on the BlogTo blurb writen by fellow panelist Carrie Young the day after.
Michael Kuchma is trying to write some thoughtful criticism about the Toronto scene and I glad that I was able to learn about it through these circumstances. I appreciate his take not only on the Thrush Holmes stuff but also on the Toronto scene in general, and I also appreciate seeing the influence of the panel talk in his writing: I guess it was worth something in in the end.
In the second link (‘why we Should…’) make note of point number 3:
Perhaps some fear that Holmes is orchestrating a brilliant art-stunt, and that passing judgment right now puts one in the vulnerable position of looking stoooopid and hasty on the day when Holmes comes clean with his Machiavellian master plan.
This is pretty much why I’ve kept quiet for this long, not wanting to ruin for everybody, and wanting to see Garry Michael Dault embarrassed for ‘falling for it’ as he had a positive review in the Globe & Mail on the day after the opening. (Why would I like to see Dault with egg on his face? Because Dault’s work as a critic is worthless – his reviews are almost always positive, unless he dares insinuate that someone has skills, at which point they are dismissed as being ‘illustrative’). A hoax or not, Kuchma’s thoughts on the whole matter are the most substantial I’ve come across and I’m glad he’s putting them out there.
Good Reads Mailing List |2007 week 09 number 1 (Chomsky, Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, Poster Art and News)
Hello. I have some news.
1. A week and half ago I updated the Goodreads website to take advantage of a WordPress backend, so take a look around if you’d like. Much easier to find and browse the back issues for example, and to see the list of selected content, to which this posting is making some substantial additions.
As well, the ability to comment is turned on, so if you have any thoughts, disagreements or whatever about the links, feel free to give me something other to process than comment-spam.
2. I was asked to be part of a panel talk on art criticism on Monday (26 Feb) at Gallery 1313 from 7-9. So come on by if you’d like.
Special Content
Today’s GR includes an article by Nadja Sayej on poster art that appeared in last weekend’s Globe & Mail. It is here for archival purposes since it’s something I both wanted to make available to future reference and to share with the mailing-list, since the G&M archives are both difficult to search and cost money to access.
This Goodreads also includes a Google Video compilation page featuring Noam Chomsky’s 1988 Massey Lecture, Necessary Illusions. Basically, somebody videoed his talks by filming still images of Chomsky on their screen while Chomsky’s lectures play on iTunes. I guess we’ll take what we can get.
I’ll admit that I put together this page rather quickly and haven’t yet sorted out whether the videos are in the correct order (I worked from how they were listed on Google Video) which is only to say that the layout may change a bit over the next few days.
The Friday before last was Noam Chomsky day at work: as I typed away at my computer, I streamed audio talks available from chomsky.info and particularly appreciated his 2006 Amnesty International Lecture delivered in Dublin. However, for whatever reason, the original mp3s were cut up into sections (I guess for bandwidth consideration) so I decided to reassemble them to make available from Goodreads. Below is both an mp3 and an indexed AAC file.
As well, the week before last I finished reading the Hardt/Negri book Multitude which I enjoyed far more than I expected to. Also available is an audio from Michael Hardt’s 2005 Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture Lecture at Toronto’s York University, The Politics of Love, Evil, and the Mulitude. Note that the clicking sound heard occasionally during the talk is of Hardt fiddling with his pen’s cap. – Timothy
And for something more interesting than vulgar politics:
Linguistics and Philosophy | Noam Chomsky http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/linguistics_philosophy.mp3 // I forgot where I found this originally, so I’m making a copy of my copy available rather than send you the unknown source. The website this is attached to, Radio Free Maine (obviously the orginal source from the audio’s intro) hasn’t been updated since 2003.
Good Reads Mailing List |2007 week 7 number 1 (The Podern)
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The Cultural Environment at the turn of the 21st Century | Timothy Comeau http://timothycomeau.com/blog/?p=334
“The Podern was so called because P followed O which followed N which followed M; so wrote the historian who coined the term. But a rival school of thought argues that the Podern is specific to the autumn of 2001 when Apple Incoperated introduced the iPod, which became the defining artifact of the time. As the iPod allowed for the assembly and playback of a vast amount of files (which hadn’t been possible before, and the iPod’s storage capacity at the time was unique) it is seen to be an appropriate term for this period since its culture consisted to a large extant of reassembly and recontextualization.”
Meanwhile, three Canadian soldiers died last week prompting the City of Toronto