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.

A lap in Mario Kart 64 played, narrated by James Joyce

09 Saturday Jun 2012

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– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Ineluctable modality of Nintendo. Signatures of all things I am here to read: cacophonous car crash, bump, traverse, thumped, reversed. Racing relentless animalistic pilgrims ever heading forward. I bypass evil yellow man, speaking dung in tongues. Imagonnaween. Surrounded by swirling seaside shells, I move onwards. No, hit! How? Star power subterfuge. A surprise from behind. Only to listen harder. Illstarred heresiarch. Ah. The eluctable modality of the audible. Oh, catch up catch up. Nebeneinander nebeneinander. His pace slackened. Victim of discarded fruit. ananaB.

–Wahoo! Wahoo!

Overtake. I’m ahead, not by much. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Onwards. Must I come to know that question mark? Mystery is a theme I am trying to escape.

Peach: (A tempo) Let’s go!

Bowzer: (Stringendo) Rraawwwr!

DEAR  DRIVING  DIRTY

Arr turns. R turns by rote. Angling hopping and hoping. Let me pass a pike’s progress.

Beach level. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving, and stopped to listen to the air. Slow now. Careful cavernous cavorting. Engaged! Open hallway. Now, red shell shall put Toad beyond the veil for good. Cadaver. Pugnosed driver. Take him out. Stymied suddenly by bifurcated banana excrescence, again! Divine intervention: substantially consubstantial.
Raised on reason, race on. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. Lead. Led. Leading this leg’s end. Legend. To beat, or not to beat?

With what meditations did Peach articulate her succumbing to the constellations power?

Star music! On a stardivarius. Weep. The infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way song, nascent enough yet moribund, prophesying 2nd place.

Damn toad I tried to pass him but his heart was going like mad and no I said no I won’t no.

Toronto-Toronto-Toronto, 2012

An interactive game for my readers

17 Thursday May 2012

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Today we live in a generous, enlightened age. Happily, we understand that school boys and girls innately comprehend the highest reaches of literature, science and math—they aren’t simply empty vessels to be filled by caveman exercises like reading from a book. A similar enlightenment extends to adult readers, who are no longer belittled by having their role confined to simply reading. Technology makes readers feel like engaged participants in what they read, or, because reading literary masterpieces should be about more than reading words on paper, the book itself actually comes alive in their hands. Readers of mine can comment on and share my work, but I want more  for my small, noble following. That’s why I’ve decided to create a little treasure hunt in every post from now on. It’s just like a real treasure hunt, only instead of hunting for gold booty you’re looking for shoddy work.

Hidden somewhere in every future post is a “mistake.” It might be a typo, a factual error, bungled research, or perhaps a ghastly howler like failing to join a coordinating conjunction to an independent clause with a comma. It’s a wild game! Anything can happen.

So, read future posts with a fine-toothed comb, and keep a record of all the “errors” you find. Be sure to store your record in a safe place, because one day I’ll ask my readers to report back all the “mistakes” they’ve found. The reader with the longest list gets a special, secret prize! In order to keep the excitement at fever pitch, I won’t disclose the prize now, but I can promise you that it’s either both very expensive and prestigious or very thoughtful.

Also, double points will be awarded to those who go backwards and find errors in already published articles. Having a hunch that I’d hold a contest just like this, I intentionally planted mistakes in my pieces all along. As a tip, when you’re deciding exactly where in my back catalogue to dive in, pieces where I defend the values of things like corporal punishment, eugenics and pop-culture are ripe for error.

In a piece of private fan-mail I once received, one very sharp reader said of my work: “The mistakes and misstatements in it form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected through a looking glass.” I have contacted this astute reader, V Sirine, and awarded him one point, and consoled him that, yes, my blunders are indeed high-art.

So next time you come across a mistake in a blog, anywhere, remember that bloggers are devoted craftsman, like me, and the “mistake” of my peers was surely just planted on the sly in preparation for a similar treasure hunt to take place in the future. Yes, we do all kinds of things for our readers.

Love,
JD

Post-Script: as you likely guessed, there is one mistake in the above piece. Let the hunt begin!

 

Overzealous parking police

10 Thursday May 2012

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While it is hard to fault someone for carrying out their chief function, there is a disproportionate amount of police force devoted to procuring money from people whose only crime is turning off their cars and walking away. When you think about it, it’s odd that we can freely drive on public roads anywhere and for any length of time, but must hand over money the second we desist.

There are different classes of parking infractions, but none of them constitute an egregious moral breech. Of course, I am not against paying for parking and punishing those who don’t pay, but it’s a question of how tightly it’s enforced. The ebb and flow of a hockey game requires the invisible presence of a ref who skilfully balances the ratio of infractions to called-penalties. Parking your car in Toronto feels like playing in a hockey game where the ref blows the whistle on every single tiny hook and hold, real or imagined.

I don’t use “imagined” loosely. I’ve heard of enough instances where someone received a ticket after paying to park. Keep in mind the parallel to hockey doesn’t really exist: refs have to make key split-second decisions during an impossibly fast game, while the parking police leisurely observe dormant vehicles. While the incompetence, or perhaps malevolence, involved in ticketing someone who has paid for parking isn’t standard, it is baffling and inexcusable. If brushing off fulminating heckles is an inevitable part of the ref’s job, we owe parking police a backlog of abuse.

That people who pay for parking shouldn’t suffer an additional charge is obvious, but it used to be possible to leave the car for a minute without receiving a guaranteed ticket. This should still be possible…risky, but possible. The equilibrium is currently too far askew.  Parking police are ubiquitous. If we adjust to the current  pressure and everyone always pays for parking, the parking police will actually be out of a job, truly a paradoxical revenge. Unless, of course, they ticket those who have paid! The fault isn’t with the individual ticketers…they’re just following orders. They are required by the city to issue a minimum amount of tickets. Parking tickets must constitute a substantial stream of income and budgets are dependent on these dollars, so parking infractions need to be found, whether they’re really there or not. I hope the parking police’s distant cousin, the police, hunt terrorists, drug dealers and rapists as vigilantly and effectively as parked cars are hunted. 

There’s a lesser-known but pervasive parking evil that is quite simply an open racket perpetrated by the city. For six months of the year my street, like numerous others downtown, requires drivers (who have already paid the city for an overnight parking permit) to alternate every two weeks what side of the road they park on. Before midnight it’s on the left, after midnight it’s on the right. Without fail, the next morning there is a parking police ticketing a procession of cars whose owners were guilty of simply forgetting what day it is.

My roommate’s working life as a bar manager makes him especially vulnerable to succumbing to this trivial law. He can’t move his car before he goes to work in the afternoon because then he’s liable to get a ticket for moving it too early. It’s understandable that when he returns from a ten hour bartending shift at 3-4am he doesn’t always have the presence of mind to recall that it’s precisely the month’s halfway point. No mens rea! He is a hard worker, not a nefarious parker to be punished. It was a legal park when he parked, but in this surreal Daliesque world where the law is tied to melting clocks, such is justice. It has cost him literally hundreds of dollars. 

What does the city accomplish by demanding drivers play a veritable game of parking hopscotch? This has nothing to do with snow removal, as the law is not in effect during winter. If it’s to do with street cleaning, why is it essential the way is cleared for them to clean first thing in the morning when they have two weeks to clean? Anyone who doubts this is purely a money grab is adorable. If there is a reason it must be this way, I am all ears.

Otherwise, this deplorable bylaw should be removed immediately and the city should retroactively compensate my unfortunate roommate. That would be a nice gesture. Of course, anyone who believes the city will do the honourable thing and consciously change the law so as to make less money is living inside a Dali canvas.

JDHalperin.com’s environmental pledge

02 Wednesday May 2012

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The team here at JDHalperin.com has Green values running through the core of our business practices. We’d like to share with you now a truly uplifting story about how one little blog has the power to heal the world…one post at a time.

As an in-house publication, our office engages in safe eco-practices by using energy-saving light bulbs, forsaking AC in summer, and using a space heater and sweaters during winter. The website’s team is comprised wholly of cyclists who literally live in the office, so no greenhouse gases are emitted during the daily commute to and from work. Regrettably, running a website does require powering a computer, but JDHalperin’s chief mainframe console is a netbook with a 12 inch screen. Our carbon footprint is minimal, and we are serious about giving back to the community*.

If a tree falls in the forest, JDHalperin.com is around to hear it. We are ever sensitive to the depletion of forestry. This blog has never printed one page of paper. In this regard, JD Halperin, the man without whom JDHalperin.com would cease to exist, has an undeniably stellar commitment to the planet, having been rejected by every print publisher he’s ever queried.

In a world where ecological and sociocultural catastrophes have become a tragically common business practice, JDHalperin.com is proud to say we have never been associated with any gulf oil spills, aboriginal displacement, organ harvesting, and we have never tested our products on animals.

That’s why when you read JDHalperin.com, you’re not just reading some worthwhile internet writing, you’re making a statement about your values. You’re telling people who you really are.

And who are you?

You’re an urbane cosmopolitan with a love of nature. Wordsworth in a condo, with your ear both to the street and to the soil. Your park is Algonquin and Trinity Bellwoods. You’re a sensory hedonist with a deeply spiritual side, a glutton for solidarity of causes big and small, far and wide. A slow thinker in life’s fast lane. Loving, reflexively courteous, and innately benevolent. Most importantly, you act now for world peace on planet Earth.

Let everybody know how magnanimous you are by reading and subscribing to JDHalperin.com today. Show everybody you care about the world’s people, plants and animals by liking us on Facebook, Tweeting @ us, or by simply telling a friend.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and healing the world begins with a single click. We can do this together.

Thanks for caring. Namaste.

*JDHalperin.com proudly supports the community by offering, free of charge, something to read.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are dead to me

27 Friday Apr 2012

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The thought of the Maple Leafs doesn’t only make sick right now, it offends me. Whether it’s a corporate apology for the woes of the feckless hockey players they own (our “captain” issued no apology, banal and tacky or otherwise), or the sports media who still carry on pretending that speculation about a wasted team matters, all of it is a reminder of cynical mass exploitation and mass delusion. And yet here I am writing about them. Why? My dead team requires a eulogy.

Every article I’ve read has failed to truly diagnosis this team’s cause of death. While on the surface the Leafs selected different months of the year to implode, the catastrophe of the post-Sundin playoff drought can be attributed solely to a lack of leadership that makes them incapable of transcending a wretched cycle. To understand this cycle let’s look to Greek tragedy.

I see our “leader”, that pylonic skater with the biggest ass in the NHL, as a symbol of what the Greeks called miasma. Miasma originated after Tantalus killed his son and boiled him in a stew to serve to the gods at banquet. Though the Greeks held slaves, they regarded infanticide, cannibalism and human sacrifice with commendably low esteem, and so Tantalus started a chain of events characterized by a subversion of human decency on this scale. Miasma isn’t simply what’s illegal or immoral, it’s what’s good and righteous inverted and upside down, but it’s come to mean more generally a poisonous atmosphere thought to rise from swamps and putrid matter that cause disease. The Leafs don’t have a leader to get past their miasma.

The Leafs captain Phaneuf can’t skate backwards, he can’t skate forwards, his shots miss the net, he intimidates nobody, opposing players laugh at him and it’s safe to say the Leafs don’t rally around him. For all this, he was made an all-star, receives 6.5 million dollars per annum and was selected to represent Canada at the IIHF World Hockey Championship this summer. To be sure, he isn’t only overvalued by the Leafs, as unfortunately the fetid swamp airs have polluted Team Canada’s judgement, but Phaneuf is surely a symbol of disorder, of the inverse of what’s right. He embodies miasma.

Variations of Tantalus’ unspeakable atrocities continued in the Greek cycle: Atreus served and watched as his unwitting brother Thyestes ate his own children in a meal; Atreus’ son Agammenon sacrificed his daughter to the gods; Clytemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon (who, after all, killed his/her daughter) after returning victorious from the Trojan war. Similarly, back in Toronto, year after year the Leafs keep missing the playoffs. Athens’ cycle ended in when Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, stopped Orestes before he could avenge his father by killing his mother. When will the Leafs receive such divine intervention? Athena is nowhere to be seen, and Phaneuf is no goddess of wisdom (or war). “Mumble mumble…losing is bad…we prefer winning… mumble mumble.”

Like everyone on Earth under 90-years-old, Sundin didn’t bring Toronto a cup, but we were perennially in playoffs. Leafs fans weren’t ashamed by default. There were better teams in the league, but we weren’t hopelessly stuck in a wretched swamp.

Yet when Sundin parted from the organization, a disturbing percentage of fans booed and jeered him for refusing to relinquish his contractual rights; they expected Sundin, holder of every important leaf record, to only concern himself with the inheritance the Leafs would gain by his death to the team. He was to captain a team best by departing it. (Interestingly, this year media berated Rick Nash for voicing a willingness to waive his no-trade clause in order to help with the team’s rebuild. Sundin was booed for not doing this.) Astronomically unappreciative of the organization’s brightest spot in forty years, it was fitting that this year’s epic slide, our miasmic dip, can be traced back to the Saturday night 5-0 loss to the Habs on the very night Sundin’s number was raised to the rafters.

While the cycle as a whole is disgusting, it’s not easy to condemn any one party. As a result, nothing will change.

It’s impossible to blame the media for their ridiculous and obsessive coverage of this feckless team when the topic alone guarantees a mass audience. It’s easy to see how an old and once prestigious team in a big metropolitan city has an impossibly large, impossibly loyal fan base. It’s easy to see how a spiritless corporation (who chose for a motto “spirit is everything”) cynically exploits this base over and over. Finally, it’s easy to see (not to excuse, but to see) how celebrity twenty-something-year-old millionaires crumble under all this ridiculous, but relentless, scrutiny and pressure. No other NHL player is burdened to the same degree as Leaf players in this final regard.

This also explains why rookies don’t develop here, and why talented players under-perform. Without Athena’s divine hand or a capable captain with the psychological fortitude to handle all this (Lupul!?), this team is in a hostile landscape and they will never emerge from this cycle.

The reasonable response to this team is to finally and actually stop going to games. A close second is forming a picket line around the ACC and screaming at fans who breach its entrance before games. Don’t buy eleven dollar beers or California rolls. Don’t buy their first, second, or third jersey on sale for only $174.99. Even if they revert for a game to their 1934 sweater with an extra blue stripe, don’t buy it.

These small actions if repeated enough times will certainly do nothing to improve the team. The Leaf machine is too big, and it’s immune to shame. There is no hope for this team. The boycott will preserve your own sanity, give you opportunity to jump to another team’s bandwagon (not ottawa…never ottawa), or give you the time to read Greek tragedy.

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.