Category Archives: Statements

Toronto’s pathetic book culture

06 Friday Jul 2012

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Our city’s book culture is terminally ill, and there is no chance for its revival. Real book culture isn’t about glossy new $30 hard cover books about a woman contractually obliged to put out in sordid ways she never imagined, it’s about the books that are enriching as they are inexpensive. They generate rapture because they are written beautifully. I made a joke months ago after buying toilet paper and paper towel, “paper is only cheap if there’s literature on it,” but after learning yesterday that Frantic City is closing, perhaps my favourite second-hand book store, this joke now contains a very tragic note. Let’s not mince words: if we ever had a literary culture, it is dying slowly, emitting only a thoroughly ignored whimper.

The hardest thing for an individual to bring himself to do now is spend dozens of hours on a book nobody in their inner-circle is reading or talking about. It will in no way boost their status among friends or peers or society at large, and investing so much time given the esoteric pay off is uncommon, or eccentric. There are active forces against reading real books, great literature: we are inundated with friends telling us “you have to watch this TV series,” or we are glued to our various screens, or we read the lofty magazines urging us to try a series of gastronomic hamburgers.

Books are anathema to the marketplace and our consumer culture, and that will never change, and it’s getting worse. Any advertiser’s worst nightmare is the consumer who can cheaply think and entertain himself for great lengths of time. A copy of Anna Karenin can be purchased for $3, and you can spend incalculable hours (YEARS!) reading and rereading it. But this keeps you away from pop-up ads, away from commercials, away from stores, away from restaurants, away from spending money, and so all these things (their presence increasingly ubiquitous) pushes people away from lengthy reading. You earn funny looks if you tell someone you read this stuff. Perhaps they doubt your intention, high-brow scorn, like you can’t genuinely love literature the way people do Game of Thrones, that you’re putting on airs to appear intelligent.

The post-literate generation needs things fast, and the great tomes take time. “Caress the detail, the divine detail!” Nabokov urges us, but he is dead and nobody listens any more. So what we have is dying second-hand stores, and mainstream book merchants stocking t-shirts, various bookish looking kitsch, board games, and somewhere, if space graciously permits, books.

The decrease in real reading coincides with an increase in public bookish proclamations. The book as symbol. There are tote bags with pictures of books on them, people volunteering a love for books in neon letters all over social media, and there was a respectable hullabaloo when Ford, the philistine Goliath, tried to strip the library of funds. Yes, but people aren’t loud when they read, they are silent. Though the above is well and good, none of it convinces me in-depth reading is broadly taking place.

This is not an argument for reading the Western Canon exclusively. I believe reading should be done widely, according to one’s taste, and that there are only two schools of literature: the talented and the untalented. Ragging on a book because it’s popular is as wildly ignorant as loving a book because it’s in the canon. But for stores to be going out business because they choose to stock great but not in vogue authors’ entire catalogues instead of their number one seller, rather than schlock, is a bad sign, and I am lashing out at the risk of appearing like a snob. (Perhaps I am a snob: suck it.)

Think hard what I’m about to say, or it’ll sound perfectly deranged or offensive. Zizec describes Gandhi as being more violent than Hitler, in that Hitler’s unimaginable atrocity was actually much more within historical context than Gandhi’s unprecedented determination towards non-violence. In this sense, the real revolutionaries aren’t in the streets demanding change with thousands of other people just like them. The biggest act of protest now is to shut yourself off from everyone and read a book in silence without sharing it on social media. This private act is violent!

That my area is sooo hip and cool because of the glossy restaurants and the multitude of watering holes offering extremely local or extremely exotic beer is a sham. Shellacked culture, no rapture. It’s not just condo culture, but the so-called counter culture that’s inane, and I feel let down by it.

Don’t get me wrong: people can indulge in whatever decadent drivel they like, but it stops being benignly amusing when their world, the physical one I share with them, can’t permit for me only a cheap book store that stocks according to taste, not predictable money makers. I want very little, and I can’t have it! At the very least, the current pretence towards a bookish culture during this insoluble literary assault is salt in my wound. I am insulted.

The tomes are entombed. So long, Solon! I am not looking forward to the day, soon approaching, where I have this conversation:

Me: “Hey, do you remember when great books cost a dollar, bought from an actual store?”

Average citizen: “No.”

 

On status, advertising, and bottle service…something I know about

15 Friday Jun 2012

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Facebook has eroded the actual meaning of the word “status,” a real shame (and no accident) since I think the concept of status is an immensely important evolutionary psychological tool which helps us understand just about everything. This is an immensely loaded statement, so let me qualify and explain what status is, how inauthentic and contrived it can be, and what all this means in regards to advertising.

Status is ever-changing reputation that you wear or live. It has nothing to do with the person’s innate qualities. If you drive a Porsche, whether you can afford it or not, you get heightened status in most communities (not amongst bohemians though…you need rags and a record of activism, imprisonment a bonus, for that). If you’re rich but drive a Honda, your status is equal to all non-rich Honda drivers.

Perhaps you don’t want to be showy, but a CEO would look ridiculous, or have his authority undermined, appearing to work on a bike. Perhaps the guy in a Porsche is just a destitute man having a mid-life crisis. You cannot judge someone without knowing their inner reasons! This piece is about considering our own reasons for buying things, not judging others. But Porsches and Hondas differ hugely in performance, materials, and the quality of construction, so the increased price is warranted.

But the most pure example of headlong waste is bottle service. Nothing signals baller status like unnecessarily paying ten times the price for the exact same drinks. If bottles were sold at $30 instead of $300, they’d no longer be desirable. Obviously people would buy the cheaper booze, but not the same people, and for different reasons. $300 bottles reliably sends the message that the buyer can afford to waste, and this message is no longer sent if the bottle is reasonably priced. I have seen sparklers attached to bottles so everyone sees who ordered: if nobody sees them ball, they’re not really balling. The impression made is worth $270 to some–this is what’s really on purchase, not the alcohol, after all.

This is a silly, irrational remnant of the Pleistocene, where having an over-abundance of resources in harsh times meant guaranteed survival to cavemen and the people in their circle. But today, spending for the sole sake of wasting is tacky and everywhere in bad taste. The most essential thing when considering evolutionary psychology is not to conflate what is in our genes with how we ought to behave. Remember, too, there’s nothing wrong with buying expensive things that are worth the money if you appreciate them.

Facebook’s diabolical genius is letting people control and publicize their own “status” for free. Of course, it’s not really a status they’re posting, but just a message that appears to people on their list. But they called it that for a reason. Facebook is the sparkler attached to the bottle service, without having to buy the bottle. No wonder its mass appeal.

Understanding status is essential to understanding the horror show of corporate branding. To be certain, branding is so successful that any company would be crazy not to do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not absurdly irrational. They give out status by making us feel predictably good about ourselves (or stop us from feeling insecure or bad) or by making us feel like we belong to a desirable set.

To be a company in the present age requires a predictable image, a term I like better than “brand”; The word “brand” falsely suggests the company is innately and permanently a certain way, where “image” rightly sounds contrived and painstakingly designed in advance to appeal to certain masses.

Companies can’t exist now unless they are seen to be giving entities which help the world in some small, yet heartening or profound way. So they give a negligible amount to a high-profile cause and take possession of a moral posture. Moral qualities are not for purchase, yet companies lay claim to them and offer moral vindication to consumers as a reward for buying their product. The formula is roughly: Fight hunger by buying this chocolate bar since we donate to so and so.

While on the surface it seems only positive that companies benefit people who otherwise would receive nothing, it’s the exploitation of our craving for status working in their self-interest that upsets me, as well as the impurity of the hijacking of the genuine yearning to do good for only its image. It’s not unlike requiring high school students to perform community service in order to graduate; the charm and the actual moral worth of the action is removed from voluntary service when it’s obligatory. So when companies posture like they care about the world, even if it does help somewhat, it ceases to be charming or genuine when their “giving” is embedded in their price, or when it makes them appear advantageously compassionate. 

You can be certain no company will ever give anonymously, unless they also secretly leak to the right media sources that they were the ones who donated so freely. I predict this will happen one day, as companies seek to appear pure and genuine.

Imagine the CEO of a fortune 500 company venerating the company’s dedication to the environment, or towards humanity, on a jumbo jet en route to Las Vegas where a business deal will be concluded amid unimaginable excess. This blends the two strains of status–exclusivity proved by over-priced gluttony, and worldly benevolence proved by high-profile giving. While I made up the above CEO, no doubt he has many real existences somewhere.

When branding is safely ignored, it’s evident that we only buy products from companies, yet there is an immense chasm between the physical properties of the product, the price at which it’s sold, and our reasons for purchase. Companies increase our status by making us feel accepted in cliques they spend millions of dollars determining we seek belonging. Beer commercials are hilarious in this respect.

The notion of a beer being tastier for a certain demographic (undergraduate party animals, urban sophisticates, etc.) is absurd. People either like it or they don’t, but it tastes the same way for everybody. The combination of barley, wheat and water cannot love hockey or act as a national ambassador for the simple reason that inanimate grains cannot have thoughts or feelings. Yet companies try and convince us that drinking their beer puts us on the “cool male hockey guy” or “patriot” team.

When a celebrity claims to use a product, ordinary mortals who also use it somehow feel linked to their high status, despite knowing they’re paid for the endorsement and might not actually feel that way. But this works in reverse too. Andrew Coyne wrote well on how Magnotta’s picture drinking a Labatt shouldn’t really mean anything:

“The idea that Magnotta’s alleged crimes would somehow have been related to his fondness for drinking Blue is only slightly more tenuous than the idea that drinking Blue would cause hundreds of sexy girls to show up at your parties.”

I’m sure Coyne knows that people aren’t rational, but a brand has a strange hold on people. Nabokov describes a similar cynical humour of the falseness in advertising in even better terms, and I never resist quoting him:

“…the world they [advertisers] create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is…that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither the sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts…”

But Nabokov wrote before there was a clear demarcation between the real life and the made up world of the advertisement. If this clear line between “ad” and “world” ever existed in Nabokov’s time, it has been fully eroded by advertisers who not only put ads into movies, but make sure their celebrity is candidly filmed consuming a product in the “real world”. The idea is to make the giving and taking of status more authentic by conflating the world of the ad, the art, and the actual world.

This deliberate obfuscation is the most pernicious delusion of all. It strikes me as unfair and as the most profound kind of lie imaginable, approaching the Platonic form of falsehood. The only reasonable response is to distrust every screen–no grain of salt is big enough. We cannot remain innocent in an age where everybody knows advertisers have hitherto unprecedented information about us, and they exist only to find new invasive ways to flatter us (“you’re so charitable and good”) or threaten us (“you’re not charitable or sexy enough”).  

And so, anybody who makes money by selling us something cannot be an impartial status bestower.  Measure your status on your own terms, or by the intimate people in your life who don’t benefit from praising or criticizing you. The people who think buying a product has any bearing on their status or character whatsoever is under a delusion not very different than the hypnotized man who makes love to a chair.

Imbecilic atheists

23 Monday Apr 2012

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My last article wherein I put forward some thoughts on my atheism shouldn’t suggest that I feel solidarity with atheists everywhere. Like anybody, atheists are not immune from stupidity and boorish behaviour.

Today’s National Post reports the story of Ashu Solo, a member of Saskatoon’s cultural diversity and race relations committee. Solo was at a dinner appreciating volunteers like himself when a city councillor made him feel “like a second class citizen,” and “excluded.” The councillor’s offence? Saying a prayer which included “jesus” and the word “amen.” Solo says municipal officers should not use their offices to “perform religious bigotry” or to “impose their beliefs on others.”

Solo is a fortunate moron. Fortunate because, in another era, Spanish inquisitors made atheists actually feel like second-class citizens. The torture Solo suffered, hearing gracious appreciation before a meal he was to eat for free, was infinitely milder than crucifixion. He is a moron for believing multiculturalism to be simply everyone behaving like him. When someone’s religious freedom is infringed (and they’re not seeking the religious freedom to kill infidels), it’s no longer a multicultural world. Multiculturalism is a careful balancing of diverse beliefs, not a wholesale expunging of them. Does this really need to be said?

I don’t pray because I am an atheist, but praying is not illegal; we are guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Solo is the one in breach here, and he owes an apology. I couldn’t care less that he’s an atheist and so am I: for a member of a city’s cultural diversity and race relations committee to be in such an ugly breach of a basic human right is inexcusable. When idiots undertake noble endeavours, and human rights and cultural diversity people are frequently noble idiots, the results are ugly. The term “religious bigotry” loses all meaning when it’s associated with such irreproachable behaviour.

Solo is awaiting an apology from the Mayor and a promise there won’t be any more prayers at city events, or else he will go to the Human Rights Commission. Used this way, as it normally is, the HRC is just a tool for self-righteous fascists to impose their narrow mind on others. Freedom of religion is rightly one of the cornerstones of Western law. Solo has no case.

Randy Donauer, the alleged religious bigot, says he was surprised when Solo felt excluded, and never meant him any harm. His surprise is understandable. After all, Donauer never imposed his religion on Solo, he just imposed a prayer on some food. It’s a shame that the blameless Donauer will have his reputation besmirched. Being accused of a human rights transgression, even if wholly innocent, never does any good.

I hope his career as a councillor isn’t adversely affected by Solo in any way. Even though it would be understandable, I hope Donauer doesn’t bend before the HRC and issue an apology. He has nothing to apologize for. For being offended without cause, for airing his baseless grievances and threats so publicly, and for putting what seems like a good man through unnecessary hoops, I hope Solo comes out of this looking like the boor he is.

I hope we Canadians arrive at a collective understanding of multiculturalism  more sophisticated than this. Imbeciles should think twice, or at least once, before issuing threats and serious accusations, and it’s a shame there’s a climate that so freely encourages overly sensitive people to vent before the country whenever their feelings are hurt, however ridiculous their feelings are. To be sure, this is a better problem than having actual human rights abuses, obviously, and recourse for an actual abuse is a wonderful thing. But absurd spectacles like this deserve scorn and condemnation nonetheless.

There are tickets issued for pulling fire alarms without cause. In Solo’s case, an apology and an admission that he is a stupid boor would suffice.

Science and religion: less than BFF

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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Science and religion are wholly and utterly incompatible. Today, the religious ingratiate themselves with science at every opportunity as, quite rightly, they know they’ll look like quacks if they are seen denying basic science the way they used to. Deprived of their historical freedom to be pontificating tyrants disseminating ignorance, many have become yogis bending over backward to give science a reach-around. Scientists, on the other hand, are disproportionately atheists or some form of skeptics. This is not a moot point. It’s very telling.

To be clear, I’m talking about “religion” as taking literally any so-called holy book, though it’s even more dangerous to grant a book divine status while allowing that it’s only an open-ended metaphor to be decoded subjectively by some esoteric and arbitrary means that only certain people have access to. In effect, this both grants permission and emboldens people to do and believe whatever they want so long as it’s rooted in a religious text, even if it’s not actually in the text. It’s a shame that atheists can never be similarly licensed!

Actually it’s a shame people today are less acquainted with the bible than in past generations. I’ve read religious texts from Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and some christian, hebrew and islamic texts, but I haven’t learned or memorized any the way even illiterate people once commonly did. People used to take knowledge of the bible for granted. There’s a lot to be said for having a common source for stories, parables, and morals, and the bible still informs our collective psyche in profound and surprising ways. I would never say a text is without value because its subject is religion, but it must be understood that all so-called holy books were written by humans and have no more divine authority than this article.

For a while, the relationship between religion and science was strained because every time a scientist made a proposal the church didn’t like he’d find himself affixed to a burning cross. Thankfully, people today who objectively study our planet no longer suffer the indignity of being called witches or heathens. The new term is scientist, and they are respected members of the community. In an encouraging sign of progress, we no longer threaten these people with death, no matter how much they might contradict a decaying roll of papyrus.

The amount of ground ceded to the secular can be gauged by comparing how the literal and dogmatic interpretations of the past are giving way to loose metaphor, or are graciously revised all together. Unthinkable in another age, pope benedict formally absolved all jews from deicide, as christ-killers, though he stopped short of thanking jews for producing jesus in the first place. Still, many current editions of religions look unrecognizable to their former selves. The concessions are encouraging. The religious used to sacrifice lambs to god, now they sacrifice their own traditions to appear relevant.

Yet there are people who actually think that the radically different accounts of the universe’s origin put forward by religion and science can both be believed at once. In the beginning god created the heaven and the earth. Presumably somewhere in Genesis some see evidence for both the Big Bang and String Theory. To believe this, you’d have to believe that for centuries the bible yielded no knowledge of the Big Bang or String Theory to any religious scholar…until scientists did their work. Coincidence? Miracle? No, but think: if a scientist is required to gain an insight into the bible that eluded religious scholars for centuries, isn’t the scientist a better religious scholar than the religious scholar?

Like religious books, religious scholars have their uses. Many are seriously intelligent, bookish people (how could they not be? Their only job is to read books and talk), but they are not infallible, and they have no more authority on “why” we live than anyone else. “Why are we here?” assumes something or someone had plans for us, and anyway it’s a ridiculous question. I make my own plans. That life requires something mystical is totally bogus. The only reasonable thing to do here is love. Simple! I love art, bagels, chess, hockey, whiskey, and sometimes even people. Can anybody ask for more in life than love? Yes: greedy and self-entitled without limit, those for whom love is not enough want an after-life too…presumably surrounded by people like them.

Religion is often diametrically opposed to itself, and only a non-religious perspective explains how this can be. Perhaps the most flagrant example is the appalling wealth accumulated in the vatican, the spiritual centre of a religion that professes to exalt the poor. By christian logic the vatican makes no sense. But evolutionary psychology explains how humans are subconsciously magnetized by great shows of status, and the vatican is nothing if not that. They could sell a Michelangelo and feed a starving country, but they don’t. But nobody’s all bad. In fairness, the vatican, the embodiment of christian charity, exhibits their art to students under 27 at a reduced rate of eight Euros, down from fifteen.

It astounds me that this religion, or any other, still poses and is taken seriously as a moral authority. The vatican’s exorbitant wealth is a scandal that cannot be exaggerated, and sadly the scandal isn’t diminished by the considerable, yet insufficient, attention it receives. If this were the church’s only scandal it would be enough, but it certainly is not: the only thing worse than a child rapist is a child rapist who believes he is spreading god’s word. If there is a bigger, viler act of hypocrisy in the world, I’d like for someone to please write it in the comment section below. (Candidate: senator fans who call Hagelin’s hit on alfredsson dirty after applauding the gruesome hit from behind on Tucker in game 5, 2002).

Jesus of the bible would sooner visit dark alleyways behind disreputable establishments where crackheads incessantly scratch their face and speak in tongues rather than visit the vatican. Jesus, who healed lepers in st. mark 1:40-45, would feel repulsed by the pope’s impossibly lavish surroundings and custom Prada shoes. Jesus would turn the crack into manna. Anyway, what would a miracle provide for the pope that he doesn’t have already? He lacks nothing. This comparison isn’t just an easy or vulgar calculation to offend people. It’s the truth that’s offensive, not the comparison.

But science and religion do have a relationship: science is religion’s battered housewife only recently emancipated. For years, religion would come home drunk after a bad day and beat science to a pulp. Now more sober and realising it is losing its dominant grip, religion has bought a dozen pretty roses for science and sits on one knee, begging forgiveness. I know I slapped and imprisoned and burned you for centuries, but let that be behind us now. I love you. Let’s be together. I can change! But science is moving on. Unlike religion, science doesn’t have an embedded fetish for redemption. It values truth only. But religion is a persistent stalker, trying to appear credible by associating with science. Science needs a restraining order.

To be sure, I wish more people were inspired by books, the bible or otherwise. Let’s be clear about exactly who I hold in contempt: it’s not people who quietly derive inspiration and tradition and feel a more complete human being by living in accordance with religious teaching. I have admiration for those who live good quiet happy moral lives, and such a thing is so rare that it would be cruel of me to remove its source. I only have a problem the moment my opinions are devalued because they aren’t supported by an alleged divinity. I might be misguided, but my opinions are just as sanctioned by god as anyone else’s. I am tired of my world view being disqualified by the bogus remnants of Mesopotamia.

In a recent discussion, I put forward that the whole fight over whether Francis Bacon or Shakespeare wrote all the plays is totally inconsequential; authorship doesn’t matter, a play by any other name would smell as sweet. I’ll add here that the only exception to this rule is when the author in dispute is god. Whoever they were, the author of every religious text was definitely one thing.
A man.

Honest profane comedy, James Joyce, and jerking off

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

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As mainstream discussions in print, blogs and on TV panels increasingly feature a class of people unfit to talk and write, I felt not just pleasure but sincere relief after seeing live comedy for my first time. It was local amateurs performing in the basement of a seedy little bar last week, and though I expected the comedians to be worse than TV professionals they were upliftingly smart and engaging. After each of the first three acts talked about masturbating, it dawned on me: comedians are honest. I realised that while a certain amount of blunt exaggeration is built into the delivery, comedy must contain a resounding truth. If the audience feels they are being lied to, they will not laugh. Laughter doesn’t just signal empty amusement, laughter signals that a truth is resonating. Nobody nails personal truths like comedians.

Profane comedians are not simply vulgar boors saying inappropriate things to get an easy laugh from other vulgar boors. To be sure, stupid easy jokes infect this artistic genre, as no genre is immune from trash, but don’t let parlour manners prevent you from seeing that unrefined language is necessary to describe unrefined truths about our species. Yet because they’re regarded as “only” comedians, their insights aren’t taken seriously. Nonsense!

If you think the subject of masturbation is only the province of Jay & Silent Bob (who I love, by the way) and other juveniles, think again. In the 2004 Vanity Fair article “Joyce in Bloom,” Christopher Hitchens recalls some heavyweight writers focused on masturbating: Mark Twain in, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”; in Money, Martin Amis reminds us that masturbation is thankfully economical (“overheads are generally low”); naturally, there is Philip Roth’s obsessively meditative Portnoy (“I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!”). But Hitchens calls Ulysses the ultimate “mastur” piece because Joyce’s libidinous novel weighs in on sex and jerking off with unprecedented length, style and complexity. Included too, for good measure, are pissing, shitting, burping, farting, eating—anything bodily. This is fused with the minutiae of a single day’s happenings in Dublin 1904 as an alternative epic vision to the various falsely-enlarged ones entrenched in us by national jingoism, religion, and other myths.

Zach Bowen says in Ulysses as a Comic Novel, “The reader is left with the paradoxical impression that the every man in each of us is vital and unique, that the trivial aspects are in fact more rationally and meaningfully heroic than the rantings of tragic heroes caught in their own self-inflicted moral dilemmas.” Hitchens echoes this, “For all its soaring, Ulysses repeatedly comes back to earth in the earthiest sense, and reminds us that natural functions and decay and frustration are part of the common lot.” This is the mark of a serious writer who cannot be dismissed as a juvenile vulgarian, yet Joyce’s territory overlaps immensely with the comedian performing in the seedy basements of downtown bars.

We tend to take too seriously any so-called highbrow author we don’t know and attribute to them an air of solemnity that doesn’t fit them at all. Hitchens recalls Joyce’s well-known quip: after a stranger in a café in Zurich seized him by the mitt and asked, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” Joyce responded, “No—it did a lot of other things too.” Hitchens saw this as evidence of Joyce’s personal pride in the department of masturbating. Perhaps people expect men in togas and long white beards to descend from the mountains and issue grand profundities about life. More likely these days, people prefer neatly packaged pseudo-mystical truths written on the lining of their yoga bags. But there can be no fundamental truths about the human condition that ignore the fact that we have human minds and human bodies, and all the low, sordid things that entails. Like Joyce, comedians nail this.

So, humourless people who think being grotesque automatically makes you ineligible as a serious thinker have it exactly backwards: we can’t talk about our species honestly if we exclude the bodies’ various functions and impulses—our prime motivator. The refusal to stare our human condition in the face leads either to the abhorrent repression of sex found in various cults and basically every religion, or to agonizingly naive formulations like “racism is bad” or “world peace is good.” Good comedians ignore these hollow clichés and address more complex, less-immediately uplifting formulations like, “our hidden, subconscious motives are coarse, irrational and fundamentally absurd.” Unlike banal pundits who risk nothing and say only what their audience expects, comedians are refreshing because they are disproportionately atheists, cynical, irreverent, and incredulous. Louis CK isn’t just hilarious, he’s a courageous and relentless thinker who confronts the uncomfortable aspects of family, work, life and sex head on. I’d way rather hear his perspectives on life than those of pious strivers or media “experts,” usually self-proclaimed or endorsed by Oprah. I think Joyce would agree. It’s no coincidence that comedians have always been some of the most forward-thinking, hate-free people out there. Rather, they don’t hate people for their race or gender but, quite appropriately, for generally being stupid and barbaric.

It’s a shame that Joyce, the certified genius, is needed here to show that humour and frank examination of our bodies is a required element of being a serious thinker. Dismissing the honest observations of profane comedians for being obscene is no better than banning Joyce’s work, which was indeed internationally banned until it was internationally hailed as a first-rank masterpiece. Calling a comedian merely “funny” is a backhanded compliment. Any stand-up act is only funny if it’s truthful. So any time a comic or satirist, anonymous or famous, makes a keen observation we all recognize about our irrational impulses and bodily functions that everyone is afraid to say in public, don’t just call them funny. Be grateful for their honesty and call them a hero.

Also, as a rule, ignore anyone who tries to sound profound when talking about the human race if they’re incapable of discussing jerking off.

Olympian prostitutes, London 2012

02 Monday Apr 2012

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As London prepares for the Olympics–where the world forgets international conflict and enjoys for a brief moment the pure spirit and high ideals of sportsmanship–British authorities should have a plan in place for their hookers. Today’s National Post describes the difficulty of the situation.

BC researchers found that stepped-up police effort during the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 had the adverse effect of separating hookers from their usual places of work, exposing them to more violence and disease than usual. To redress this, a potential plan for this year’s Olympics might include the creation of brothels that operate parallel to the sporting events this summer, says a nameless author of a new study on “the sex trade and the 2010 Olympics.” No mention yet on whether the brothels will be physically located within the athletes village proper, or perhaps whether they’ll go one inclusive step further and make prostitution a new Olympic event. There is room in this Olympics, after all, since the IOC dropped women’s baseball. It’s clear what organizers think is more popular.

There are two separate forces here: health advocates are concerned for the well being of hookers, while the Olympic committee is more concerned with, hello hello, the optics and public relations. I’m not sure what the law is in the UK, but thankfully at least all parties seem equally unconcerned.

Advocates are trying to develop a strategy based on past mistakes. Apparently, before the Vancouver Olympics the media warned that there would be a “prostitution explosion” expected to descend on Vancouver, and hordes of entrepreneurial-minded sex workers the world over would flock to this veritable Klondike gold rush. None of this happened, however, only incidents of police harassment increased.

This story interests me for a couple reasons. One, it seems Olympic organizers and the media expect that when the world is invited somewhere, the world inevitably wants hookers. Even if this is apparently not true. Personally, I do what I can to welcome and oblige my house guests, but Olympic organizers don’t share my sense of hospitality. Two, hooker showdowns force us to reveal our moral hand.  How do we reconcile Judeo-Christian values with reality? What trumps?

The question I’m interested in isn’t really whether prostitution is good or bad–a worthwhile but more complex issue beyond my scope–but whether abstract moral posturing is more important than harming real people.

Also, Olympic stories tend to be of the uplifting human overcoming the odds, national glory, or stoic acceptance and better-luck-next-year variety. I like that there’s already some sordid down-to-earth muck in the mix, a tangle of thorns to be worked out before the eyes of the world. Deal with that Olympic organizers!

A defence of snobbery

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Snobs have a bad reputation. Most people only think the word is disparaging, but there are at least two kinds of snobs.

The first class of snob is indeed a repulsive creature, egotistical, falsely-self important, and in most cases a total philistine. Their motivations derive from what they think the outside world expects of a quality person. This perception of the outside world, right or wrongly perceived, dominates their inner life.  They don’t love art, but  talking about it with sophisticated sounding jargon makes them appear cultured to people who don’t know better, and owning it allows them to look down on people with less money. They eat at the best restaurants oblivious of the way the food is prepared. Normally, maintaining this false self-importance requires being an asshole to those “lower” than them. This is the quintessential mark of the snob, and these vulgar boors should be denounced everywhere.

Ahh, but this second class of snob deserves a standing ovation! The Noble Snob loves what he loves and refuses to indulge in any artistic or cultural opinion but his own–not because he matters per se, but because the subject matters to him. His internal world directs the external one. He cannot sit idly by while banal, mediocre criticisms tarnish what he loves. He may become excited and brash while describing his loves and hates, and so is more likely to ignore the sense of politeness and decorum which, however well-meaning, is more concerned with preventing people from looking foolish than getting at the truth. The Noble Snob’s willingness to publicly criticize someone else’s opinion can injure egos, so they’re branded a snob in revenge.

Who are you to say? This pathetic sentence is only uttered by idiots who don’t understand that some art is better than other art. Art as “equally valuable so long as you like it” isn’t post-modern or profound, it’s just very stupid. Enjoy what you enjoy, but no amount of preference changes the fact that Bach and Tolstoy are superior artists to Lady Gaga and Stephen King. That’s just fact. Where you are on the hierarchy may be up for debate if the two artists are comparable, but there is a hierarchy.

Now, a Noble Snob becomes an asshole the second he is condescending towards people who like these latter artists. A good melody and a good story is a lovely thing, and I used Gaga and King as examples because they are indeed talented, prolific artists despite their incredible popularity. Popularity has no bearing on the quality in art one way or the other: obscurity doesn’t add value, and popularity is anything but synonymous with quality. Art’s merits are never revealed in statistics, and that’s exactly why the discussion about quality in art needs to be candid, robust, and ongoing.  It’s ridiculous to say that only the best art is worthwhile, so sneering at people who don’t like (but respect) canonical artists makes you the bad kind of snob. There’s tons of wicked artists out there.

Now, being condescending towards people who watch Jersey Shore is noble. Even the cretins who watch it know this, that’s why they excuse themselves and call it a “guilty pleasure.” Indeed, they are guilty: when shows become wildly popular without requiring writers and actors, their fans become enablers of junk and they should be tarred and feathered. When something is obviously made to be both horrible and profitable, from c-rate movies to fast food, it should be ridiculed without fear of being called a snob. But the case of Jersey Shore and its equivalents aren’t really a case at all, since nobody would call it art. But there’s a grey area between good art and trash that can rightly be debated. In order to avoid looking like a fool don’t criticize something you don’t know about, whether it’s high or low brow. But, once you have seen/judged it, feel free to tear it apart if that’s the way you feel. The search for quality depends on honest conversations.

In an age of invasive marketing where “quality” is determined by ratings and YouTube hits, enthusiasts avidly indulging their idiosyncrasies are heroes. People kind of know this now, and that’s why they eagerly, but with an endearing half-hearted reluctance, call themselves “nerds.” Maybe they love food, shaving with an old school straight blade, architecture, coffee, board games, film noir, classic literature, beer, scotch, chess, fashion…whatever. The aspiration towards quality isn’t something to be ashamed about!

The stigma of snobbery hinders people from sharing their actual thoughts and learning more about good stuff. Avoiding all friction in conversation may be a Canadian virtue ingrained in us (“I’m sorry,” “No no, I’m sorry!”), but it’s so boring! So criticize away. Nobody should be on guard about coming off as a snob, so long as they’re the right kind of snob.

Personhood: should all persons, including dolphin people, legally be persons?

23 Thursday Feb 2012

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The past couple days the National Post has reported that animal rights activists in the States are trying to get dolphins, and other cetaceans, to legally be called “persons” under the law. According to Emory University neuroscientist Lori Marino, “their basic needs are very much like humans–to be able to stay alive, not to be confined, to make choices and travel, and perhaps foremost to engage in social interaction.”

I laughed at this because I can’t hear the words cetacean and Marino without thinking about Ace Ventura, but her quote got me thinking. Doesn’t her criterion apply to every animal? I know dolphins are really smart, but find me an animal that prefers to die, to be confined, and to remain dormant and isolated from its own kind.

Last year I joked that one day, at the current rate magnanimous human persons bestow rights ever outward, owning a dog will be considered vile and archaic. Consider: we order them around, exert dominance by actually keeping them tethered to a chain around their neck in public, we feed them after they perform tricks, and, worst of all, if it suits us, we cut off their balls. One might say that dogs seem happy in human homes, but it’s just centuries of Stockholm syndrome. Domesticated…what a horrible euphemism for slavery.

Is SeaWorld a concentration camp? It used to be a fun place to take your kids. Ahh, the times are changing. Tasha Kheiriddin from the Post insists the problem with bestowing human rights to animals is they cannot possibly enter into the social contract: “an animal bears no responsibility, legal or otherwise, for its actions. You cannot sue a dolphin if it bites you or wrecks your boat.”

If the dolphin manages to acquire personhood under the law, while at the same time managing to avoid all obligations of the social contract, perhaps they really are smarter than humans. If I bite someone or wreck their boat I’m in trouble. Well played, cetacean.

It’s funny to consider that this discussion is taking place while in the States Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney believes corporations are people. By this he must mean that, just like with human people and with cetacean people, it is incorporations’ nature to stay alive, to not be confined, to make choices and travel, and to engage in social interaction. Well, let’s examine: no corporation wants to die, globalisation is anything but confined, decisions are made, business class is even its own travel designation, and corporations do hold social events like family barbecues and golf tournaments. So corporations are persons too. But since corporation people are made up of human people who can comprehend the social contract, they will be made to uphold it: if a corporation bites you or wrecks your boat, you can sue. Corporations are no cetaceans.

But there is a problem: according to the definition of persons that dolphins and companies have successfully met, human people no longer qualify as people. Consider: increasingly humans have become fatally overweight and cancer-prone, remain confined in office cubicles and 500 sq. foot condos, choice remains elusive as our social systems act upon us, we travel albeit on broken public transit systems and inadequate bike lanes, and anyone who’s seen the zombies on their iPhones in public agrees we are no longer a social species.

So there you have it. Dolphins and companies are people, unlike human beings.

We are the last pre and post internet generation. Be scared!

05 Monday Dec 2011

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’84 babies, plus or minus a couple years, were the first to grow up with internet but the last to remember life without it. This perspective will be unavailable to future generations. Every generations believes they’re nothing like the previous one, but now it’s true.  Technology is like an avalanche covering everything, so the consequences will be widespread and unpredictable, and not all good. There’s a mentality that’s slipping and there’s no turning back.

It’s hard to sum up concretely, but it has to do with the “boys will be boys” climate that pervaded basically until I was a boy. Not just “boys,” but life will be life. Let it go. You can’t control everything. My guess is 50 years ago, on average, people matured earlier, had longer attention spans, were more articulate, more inclined towards saving money than spending, and reflexively took responsibility for themselves and their actions. Generations used to entail a span of decades. Grandfather-father-son. Perhaps there’s a new generation every 10 years.

The school outlawing “hard” balls during recess after a mother got hit in the head illustrates what I mean. It’s not just the NHL taking head shots and concussions seriously.  I hope soccer mom is OK, but in the name of safety they’ve also eliminated any threat of exercise and fun. Before the 80s I don’t think it ever would have occurred to a mother to outlaw playing with balls during recess. Something has changed. Technology.

Technology, especially the internet, makes society feel entitled: we feel empowered because in real time we talk and see people across the world, book trips, order food to our door, access unprecedented amounts of literature, watch TV and movies from all eras, receive news complete with video from anywhere in the world. And all immediately. We are gods, albeit immensely distracted ones. Those who remember a life before internet can hardly believe our new power, but it’s just a mundane fact of life for those born into a world of fibre optic cables and iPads.

Technology leads to narcissism gone-wild, compounded by marketing campaigns and devices which relentlessly cater to self importance: they’re called “I” pods; playlists rearrange albums to suit our preferences; everyone has a platform to broadcast their “status” to a waiting audience; the “you” in YouTube is us.  We are constantly told to exalt ourselves. If something harms us, it’s wrong and we should outlaw it.

This constant inundation erodes not only critical thinking, but the effectiveness of what used to be reliable institutions–school and news. Education makes things worse by over emphasizing the internet and neglecting the pillars of Western education. Yes, little Johnny’s mind is modern and rapid, as evinced by his innate mastery of social media (writing incoherently and posting vulgar pictures for friends and strangers), but maybe he’d learn more about the human condition after seeing how Odysseus mastered himself through Athena’s grace and Zeus’s justice.  Is there an app for that?  Modern times and serious books have parted company for good, but the head first slide into philistinism isn’t just the teacher’s fault. We were just following curriculums! It’s at a deeper level. That technology provides more access to literature is irrelevant here: if nobody’s reading it may as well be unavailable.

Our news institutions that ought to guard the knowledge are just as prone to change, with mixed results. The Maclean’s special issue from November 14 featured stories in “augmented reality.”  Scan your smartphone over stories with an AR logo to get cool bonus features. Fair enough.

But Toronto Standard ran a worrying article recently about online news sources who, in a hurry to get the scoop, publish first, fact check later.  An article with the same web address can present different facts from one day to the next, with only a vague note indicating a revision, not what’s been changed.  This happens “everywhere,” from the CBC to the New York Times. It didn’t happen in ink.

John Macfarlane, editor of the Walrus, writes in January/February’s issue (currently unavailable online) that “the quality of workmanship in North American newsrooms…is declining.  The reasons…include a generation of journalists who know how to tell a story and little else.” He also says media credibility everywhere is undermined since the Murdoch scandal. “If the press is to continue its independence, it must be seen to be monitoring its own behaviour, vigorously and fairly.”  He doesn’t explicitly state technology is responsible for both, as it’s defined the generation doing the declining work and enabled the cell phone/e-mail hacking, but it’s true. That technology can be wonderful isn’t the point. There are serious drawbacks.

How the internet has changed growing up is the subject of December’s Toronto Life cover story, “the Secret Life of 13-year-old girls” by Alexandra Molotkow.  Sadly (and ironically) it’s unavailable online. Molotkow’s voice is conversational but not colloquial, intelligent but unpretentious. Ruthlessly honest, and funny too. Her article is largely about her experience with internet sex, but she notes the bigger point: “the internet unshackled us from our milieus.”  It was liberating for her, but incomprehensible to every previous generation. There’s never been such a chasm between people, even those close in age. As TL editor Sarah Fulford points out, “I’m only a dozen years older than Molotkow, but her relationship to chat rooms and web journals and texting is so foreign to me we might as well be from different generations.” Indeed.

Those born in the late 90s and early 2000s will look at 80s babies the way we view those from the 40s and 50s. “I was alive before the internet.” Translation: “In my day, we walked 10 miles to school in snow this high, and we didn’t have no boots neither.”

The underlying things we take for granted have permanently altered. Teenagers with cell phones will never again feel the liberation of being out of reach from their parents. Depraved behaviour at parties, or by police, isn’t only captured on camera, but potentially circulated online. We can get around in any city with Google maps. There’s too many to name.

Imagine when the last pre-internet person dies. If the sensibilities, habits, traditions from our collective past only exist on screen for concerned historians, but inhabited by nobody, it’s hard to predict what things will look like. This is worrying. Like democracy, the internet is wonderful, powerful and permanent, but it’s what we make of it. And it’s what we keep from before.

So, when people ask why I don’t do every modern thing ever, maybe there’s a reason besides I’m cheap. Maybe.

Inappropriateness on Queens campus…so much can go wrong, and did

24 Thursday Nov 2011

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When I’m in the company of a good trusted friend there are no jokes I can’t make, and I make them, but I have the good sense not to publish them because I don’t have the same trust and understanding from my small group of noble readers (though I’m sure you’re all wonderful people). I’m irreverent, but just because I make a horrible joke doesn’t mean horrible moral behaviour will ensue.  This trust is not extended towards students at Queens University.

Father Raymond J. de Souza writes in today’s National Post about the Queen’s band who, when they’re not performing at football games, sing from their own songbooks “a compilation so explicit, so depraved, so celebratory of promiscuous debauchery” that they were suspended for the rest of the semester. It was too lewd for the National Post. Thankfully, this blog has no such standard of decency.  Choice excerpts:

“The pamphlet contained phrases like ‘I will rape you with a lamp’…’Chew me, screw me, suck me, fuck me, yaaay Queen’s.'”

“Front page titles over the last three years have included ‘mouth raping your little sister since 1905.'”

No doubt performing lyrics that may as well have been written by the Marquis de Sade, while wearing your school’s uniform, was beyond stupid.  What did they expect? But does this mean the students involved are necessarily moral failures who will slip into a depraved abyss without the universities’ intervention? The university thinks so: in addition to their suspension, they are being sent to “human rights and equity training.”

Here’s where things go wrong in the article. De Souza makes a huge leap, putting the pitiful judgement exercised here on par with Yale’s alleged sexual-assault problem. Bad lyrics in bad taste, however bad, is fundamentally different than an act of sexual-assault. Equating them is dangerous. If there is a sexual-assault problem at Queens it must be immediately and thoroughly dealt with, but the article doesn’t say this is happening.  There’s only a tenuous connection: Yale has a rape culture on campus while Queens students are told not to sing about it for recreational amusement. Charges of rape are too important to be invoked without foundation.

What de Souza really condemns is the “hook-up” culture at Queens.  He cites the Yale report, which sounds more than a little totalitarian: “Because the social environment is so open, students seem unsure of how to develop meaningful relationships, set appropriate boundaries, determine their own social values or act in their own best interests, short and long-term” [emphasis mine].

Wow.  Claiming that Queen’s students (young adults, but adults nonetheless) are incapable of maintaining meaningful relationships or acting in their own self-interest is a serious charge that requires more evidence than de Souza offers, and it’s also none of his damn business.  Students are old enough to go into the army: they can manage their personal relationships and determine what’s in their own best interest without anybody’s approval. I’m inherently sceptical of the patronizing attitude that adults can’t live their own lives free of the “exquisitely progressive,” whether it’s an advisory committee or a celibate priest.  Most people don’t have it all figured out at 20 but they grow up OK.

It’s a little rich that de Souza denounces the sexual climate on campus while accompanying the article is a photo of literally six upside down cheerleaders, asses out, legs wrapped around the crotch of a male counterpart who smiles gleefully. It’s a shade away from acrobatic Roman-Greco coitus. Maybe the NP needs equity training too. Lurid. Eye-catching sure,  but I’m offended. Horribly offended.

Is common sense too much to ask in all of this? “University band: don’t sing about raping girls with lamps.”  Equity training, a vague and terrifying term, is just the universities’ empty recourse for publicly demonstrating accountability. Don’t worry donors, we’re on it.  Keep giving us money.  Equity studies doesn’t enhance students’ critical thinking ability the way, say, studying English, history, classics, law, or other extinct university subjects would. That students are busy adults with their own minds and things to do, including school work, doesn’t concern the University as much as reversing their tarnished image…of course, not remotely surprising.

But strangely, the article makes it seem like university students would otherwise be devoted prudes abstaining from all “debauchery” if only the university climate wasn’t so tantalizing. Revelation: students do drugs, drink, and have sex because…wait for it…they can. Many find debauchery more fun than work, and their schedule is permitting. I’ve even heard rumours of sex and drugs in high school. Maybe young students would take up sobriety if they could occupy themselves with a harmless diversion, say by playing with balls during recess. University students don’t have sex because they’re “bombarded by various campaigns for sexual health,” a bombardment which de Souza calls “not the noblest vision of the human prospect.”  Maybe it doesn’t promote true love, but it might spare them from STDs.

If only administrator’s were as concerned with education as they are imposing morals on their adult patrons.  This isn’t grade school!  This doesn’t excuse the band from singing blatantly offensive lyrics while representing the school. Suspensions are in order for the band, but equity training is repulsive.  Maybe students would learn good judgement as a by-product of good education, and exercise reticence instead of singing about raping the mouth of somebody’s sister. It shouldn’t be much to ask.

At least not in public.