Our Toronto taggers are lit-geeks

This is too cool. Here’s a picture of some graffiti that appeared by the Humber Bay Arch bridge looking over Lake Ontario:

That tag, ISBN 486-28495-6, is the International Standard Book Number for the Dover paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist meditation, Walden.

Beautiful juxtaposition, the pristine landscape of the Walden woods with the artificially assured wranglings of our will to utility. Also the tagger’s use of what amounts to a serial number instead of more direct means (a quote or a picture) evokes yet another level of irony, the manner in which what was considered, more than a hundred years ago, to be socially provocative and mildly anarchic – what Thoreau himself would term ‘Civil Disobedience’ – is now categorized and codified, dulling the edges of any bite it might have once possessed. C. introduced me to the term ‘negative intellectualism’, which I think might apply here, albeit in more amorphous ways. Using a reference instead of the thing referenced also points to itself as a symptom of our hyperlink times, when more often than not the chain of interconnection outweighs the content being linked.

My hats and shoes are off to you, tagger! May you find more juicy buttons to press.

The Temptation of the West

My Amazon wish list, which I use as a general to-read schedule, is over five pages now, but I am slowly chipping away at it in the dank confines of second-hand bookstores and on the occasional trip to the over-commercialized gloss that is Indigo. It’s a last resort, I swear.

However when faced with yet another unfamiliar row of books squashed in the dusty closet space of Balfour’s or Seekers, I am tempted to forget my carefully wrought selections of literature, biography and philosophy. Such was the case with Andre Malraux’s early philosophical treatise masquerading as literature, “The Temptation of the West”.

I was intrigued both by the cover design by surrealist Joel Peter Johnson, as well as his connections with Charles de Gaulle’s government in France during the 60’s and his instrumental decision that sparked off one the most quixotically grand riots the world had seen.

Malraux was, at that time, the Minister of Culture in de Gaulle’s cabinet, and enjoyed a reputation with the cultural elite as being an astute critic and philosopher with a slightly risque body of work and extensive knowledge of Chinese culture, seeing as he had spent many years there and was witness to several (and at the time failed) communist uprisings.

Anyway, at this time the French New Wave was just starting up, and maverick film-makers like Jean-Luc Goddard (see Breathless if you haven’t already!) and Francis Truffaut were making ‘waves’ with the French youth, breaking all narrative convention in their movies and giving rise to concepts like the Auteur theory and Cinema Verite. I fell in love with movies after experiencing the intellectual headiness, the vigor, the anarchic flame embodied in every frame of works like Pierre le Fou and Band of Outsiders. And so did the disaffected youth at the time, suffering under unemployment, the militaristic regime of de Gaulle, and a ridiculously inept/corrupt university system.

In May of 1968, Henri Langlois, long-time film-archivist and operator of the popular cinema-phile hangout, the Cinematheque Francois, was fired from his job by Andre Malraux. Why did Malraux do this? He cited administrative incompetence, but for the bevy of head-strong iconoclasts like Goddard and Chabrol, there was an underlying sense of a clash of sensibilities, ironically the very same subject that is tackled in Malraux’s book. The Nouvelle Vague film-makers revolted, holding demonstrations in favor of Langlois and even ruining the Cannes Festival by storming theaters and holding down the curtains, preventing any films from being seen. This in turn sparked off larger riots, and before long hundreds of thousands of people, youth and otherwise, were marching in the streets (including Goddard, Truffaut, Chabrol and others), and after countless deaths, teargas canisters and car-fires (the regular repository for any riot), France’s ‘Fifth Republic’ was overturned.

As a cinephile, all this makes me a little giddy. It is almost inconceivable today for film directors to be so politically active and influential, and movies to be anything but expendable fodder for the popcorn-chewing masses. But I am contended that it was not always like this.

Anyways, what of Malraux, the unwitting spark to all that malcontent? His “The Temptation of the West” is set up as a series of letters from a Frenchman who travels to China to a Chinese who travels of Europe. The juiciest bits come from the rather stereotypically named Ling, who dissects Western civilization in the light of Eastern philosophies concerning art and the development of man. Here are some excerpts:

“We are not sketching a single illusory image of ourselves, but many images, some of which are hardly even rough drafts that the annoyed mentality rejects, even though it collaborated on the outlines. Any book, any conversation has the power to make these images appear; reinvigorated by each new passion, they change in accordance with our most recent pleasures or latest pains. However, they are potent enough to leave in us secret memories which then grow so great as to constitute one of the most important single elements of our lives: that awareness we have of ourselves which is so veiled, so opposed to reason that any attempt of the mind to understand it only makes it disappear. Nothing definite, nothing that allows us to define ourselves; only a sort of latent power… As if we lacked only the opportunity to carry out in the real world the exploits of our dreams, we retain the confused impression, not of having accomplished them, but of having been capable of accomplishing them. We are aware of this power within us just as an athlete, without thinking about it, is conscious of his strength. Pitiable actors who don’t want to stop playing our glorious roles, we are, in our own eyes, creatures in whom is dormant an unsophisticated and jumbled procession of act and dream.”

“The artist is not the man who creates, but the one who feels. Whatever may be the qualities, or the quality, of a work of art, it is minor, for it is no more than one proposition of beauty. All the arts are decorative. Consider, for example, bamboos, on which the multicolored birds of the imagination love to perch, or banyans, which have the pomp of funeral chants; give the gardener, a man worthy of consideration, his salary and at least some respect. But now look at the river which mirrors these things; it alone is truly worthy of admiration.”

“Reading and the theater, for unsophisticated people, are sources of imaginary lives. Nothing is less disinterested than the desire to know. The West, ignorant of opium, has the press. Each day’s struggling ambitions, defeated or victorious: a newspaper. What a world swirls behind the eyes of an absent-minded reader! This is what gives the men of our race a walled existence. Nothing reverberates inside them with the sound one would predict. Imagine, my friend, that among us there is not a man who has not conquered Europe. What possibilities for scorn…”

“When I say ‘cat’ what dominates my mind is not a picture of a cat, but an impression of certain supple, silent movements peculiar to cats. You distinguish among species only by their outlines. Such a distinction applies only in death. (It is said that your painters used to study the proportions of the human body by sketching cadavers.) … The notion of species is an awareness of what ties together the forms existing in individuals who belong to a group: the necessity of particular movements. That is why it can no more be exactly defined than can style; but style can be achieved, the sense of species, only suggested. Suggestion is the highest technical perfection in art; it is the symbol of the living as the outline is the symbol of the dead. To understand a universe of successive existences one must first understand suggestion, and it is by suggestion that the artists, in his play, discovers the universe. It marks the profound distinction between your conquest and our own: you go from the obvious analogies to more obscure ones, while we proceed to irreconcilable differences.”

Here is something very curious. The book was published in 1926, and I stumbled upon a passage that evokes the precise spirit of French existentialism that would gain force more than three decades later with Sartre and Camus:

“At the core of Western civilization there is a hopeless contradiction, in whatever shape we discover it: that between man and what he has created. This conflict between the thinker and his thought, between the European and his civilization or his reality, between the indiscriminate consciousness and its expression in the everyday world through everyday means – I find it in every aspect of contemporary life. Sweeping away facts and, finally, itself, this spirit of contradiction trains our consciousness to give way and prepares us for the metallic realms of the absurd.”

A five-minute primer on what’s wrong with Canada, Toronto and the TTC

So here’s a video that had me LOLing for awhile. As a person who did have his plans screwed up over the weekend due to the strike, I’m all for the “Essential Service” motion. Anyways, watch this and laugh. Then cry.

abbey-sense

I have been absent from these plains. I apologize.

Wait… I’ve said that already.

Well anyway, the primary reason was the neglect of my computer, which happens whenever I come to an electronic ’saturation point’, and the sight of anything remotely evocative of diode-intelligence becomes irrelevant and vaguely nauseating.

I have been fighting a battle with myself. The outcome is still not clear. Large, roving armies clomp about on blood-stained fields, and the dismembered bodies of foes and friends alike constitute the charred, organic landscape in their death-poses. I am besieged and running out of food. We have a well in here but each day the water we draw out is less clear, muddied with a rustic silt. I fear that the blood that is being spilled outside the city walls is seeping far into the soil and tainting the ground-water. We are growing accustomed to imbibing the life of our dead.

A bleak sight, to be sure. But I have a trick or two stashed in the cow-shed. We must be discrete with ourselves. It is the only way to assure victory.

Check out these remarkable drawings by zoologist and artist Ernst Haeckel.

He was one of the primary influences of Darwin himself, coined many of the biological terms that have become ubiquitous today and even mapped out a genealogical tree connecting ALL lifeforms far before any such thing was even deemed possible. Many of his theories seem remarkable and futuristic even today, the most fascinating of which is in these three words: “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny”.

Which is to say that the course of individual physiological/psychological development parallels or mirrors the course of the species’ physiological/psychological development. This is especially fascinating when you start to think about how many social theorists have argued along the same lines, including those stalwarts Freud and Marx. “Civilizations and Discontents” rests its entire logical postulate on this relationship, as does the connective tissue between Marx’s individual nature and collective nature. Even Hegel to an extent argues the same thing with his Historical Reason.

But this opens up an entirely new can of squid: If individual psychology can be altered to experience transcendental states, then, if we accept the former postulate, how do those states manifest themselves in larger social structures? Do they become objectified in architecture and art? Do they have the capacity to change the underlying ontology of civilization itself?

Bah, humbug! I must get back to the ramparts. The enemy has found a crack in the walls.

Our invisible fields of chatter

Here is an amazing student project that seeks to re-conceptualize our ideas of radio-waves as emitted by our various and variously hued electronic gizmos. Wifi, Bluetooth, GSM and others all emit very specific electromagnetic patterns that until now have remained abstract models on computer screens. But after seeing some of these immaculate visualizations, I can’t help but imagining these giant, blobbish monsters throbbing their way around our cityscapes.

I was fired from my job today. A remarkable sense of freedom has enveloped my being, and for awhile I drift unencumbered by the rift that characterized my employment. In terms of economy, what I produced and was paid for was security. As a producer I secured the safety of the client, and was required to uphold its interests above all others. This ’security’ that I produced was an intangible miasma that I could not take home with me, could not see, touch, or experience in any way. It was ultimately a ‘feeling’ that I was producing, for to be secure is ultimately to feel secure. And this feeling of security was not even mine. It did not belong to me for even an instant. Because I had no emotional ties to the company whose assets I was supposed to secure, this feeling was far from a true objectification of my individuality. In fact, such objectification was actually perceived to be at odds with the task at hand. I was not supposed to fraternize, I was not supposed to be ‘friendly’, and the endless bureaucracy required to accomplish even the most menial of tasks such as opening a bloody door, marred the ultimate usefulness of the operation itself, elevated the cause above the effect. It is no wonder that I stopped giving a shit about my job a long time ago, and today’s events were long overdue. Sun Life Financial is not a bad company. It is a good ‘corporate citizen’. It pays its dues by dipping into a few charities, funding a few arts programs and treating its employees well. Apart from the fact that during World War II, securities from the highly secret bonds from the UK held in the vaults of Sun Life (including, purportedly, the Crown Jewels), helped to finance the war, it is a good company. It has made amends.

I must now make mine.

echoes

The war against Tibet is a war of perception. China wants the world to adamantly believe that they are in the right, that the violence they have exercised and continue to exercise is merely a necessary reaction to the perceived violence of the Tibetan monks. Tibet, according to them, are the ones who cast the first stone, justifying their use of unmitigated force against an unarmed population that has left hundreds dead on both sides. But now the veil has been broken.

It has been revealed that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army posed as monks in order to instigate this unrest. Afterwards, China can claim that it was under the auspices of the Dalai Lama that the Tibetan people rose up against their ‘gentle rulers’.

If you remember, this was the same thing that happened at the North American Leaders summit protest in Montebello, Quebec, last year, albeit on a smaller scale. Beware of these tactics.

do not underestimate your foes

Here is a market research video leaked from an advertising firm called Two West that prides on something they call “Transcendental Design”. This is the cutting edge of marketing and design. It’s shiny, it’s cool, it’s irreparably fucked up. These are Very Smart People who have, for some reason or another, decided to use their abilities to manipulate as many people as possible, people they regard as merely steps away from apes. Take a look at this video from one of their seminars:

What is scary is the look of all those young professionals listening with rapt attention to this man’s words. With the possible exception of one of the older women at the back, none of them reveal even a hint of irony in their postures, passively taking it all in for future use.

If only…

This is too funny. Watch this video to the end and you will see some of the best subversive activism by the Yes Men. As you are watching you will become aware that nobody from Dow Chemicals would be that forthcoming and honest, and that no company would actually set out the measures being described, but its remarkable how so many bought it.

Perhaps We Should Have Made That Left Turn

The world is both smaller and larger than expected. It sits perched on the window-sill like a gorged sparrow, its beak shining, wet from pecking at the ground. Recent rain. A ruffle of wings and a cocked head. I turn my back to the window, trail the fugue of dreams I have escaped. I am waiting for the sharp sounds.

Remarkable, the elasticity of happiness. How it stretches over the fingers of time, a cat’s cradle waiting for another hand. I triangulate, pull back the nip of band that hides my bright pellet, wait for the darting flesh. The red welts on your back are the notches that mark my marooning. I have scavenged your darkest places for my sustenance, long ago stole away the jams and preserves that decorate your seep-light. Now it’s the caves for me, smooth limestone that hews your steep exhaustion, and outside, canopies that reveal the sky your ragged garment, shifting across your shoulders in unending ease. I trawled your shores for other wrecks, driftwood and shells. The tall masts of previous scars were easy to climb, an ax to split their pain. Growing bolder I took to jumping rocks, calling you names that you spit back with the wind, and then the whirlpool that sucked away my shoes. Barefoot I scaled palm-trees, drank coconut water and pretended to be drunk. I cling to your sculpted form with all the ardor of a 16^th century Franciscan, mourning in sackcloth. I am bald. But I had to buy a comb for my beard.

Later, when we were bored, we took to driving. The eternity of roads to replace our charted bounds. Never the highways or the three-lane grid-cuts, but rather those tributaries quiet and shallow, the backwash of residential housing, small grocery stores with names like Mendel’s Dry Goods and The Everything Store. Speed past them all, the propped up apartments, the shanty towns, the empty lots like eye-sockets, staring us down. Stop for food, stop for piss, stop for rest, stop for love, stop for a three-legged dog and his blind master, stop for the Memorial Parade, stop for cotton-candy and an authentic German bratwurst, stop to fight, stop to fill-up, stop for the largest tree you have ever seen, branches as thick as smoke-stacks, skin so rough you are afraid it will grind you away with its age, stop to shit, stop to be silent, stop to play the song, pull off your clothes and indent the hood with our hooves, stop in a ghost town and sit on our haunches, wail the acrid wind and suck the blood from sunset, so drunk, so high, lets break into the house, pretend to live here for a day, I’ll make breakfast, you clean the dust from my hair, we don’t need so many clothes, sew up some curtains, drag in a mattress, light a fire, big one, so I can see it reflected in your eyes and know that you are strong, stop, stop, stop. We ran out of money, ran out of gas, drove the car into a ditch. You hit your nose on the dash, bled all over the upholstery. That was the last time we made love. Gearshift, speedometer, gas-pedal. I ran you to the ground.

Suppose you came to me, clothed in periwinkle and the strange scent of regret? A garland of Queen Anne’s Lace, honeysuckle, and the prickly skins of rambutans, all woven together with my grandmother’s hair. Why my grandmother, you used to ask, and all I could do was write a poem. As if an excuse for forgetting so much of the past. But, suppose you came? There would be blood in your eyes, a burst vein to mark my shortcomings. The skin of your soles cracked and peeling, the silt of burning asphalt lodged between your toes. Your feet caress my bedpost, I bury myself in the covers. I can hear the friends you have brought with you, so many when you still cared, and they are holding your veil before you, lips moving ceaselessly in their litany of loss. Loss? I want to tear that word from every being, so that I can speak it again and again as if for the first time. But, suppose you came? I can see it now, the sudden reverence, descending with the slow force of an air-raid siren. That whoop of joy and doom, one to the other. Perhaps we should have made that left turn.