Entrepôt - Benjamin Leszcz

Contents
THE FRONT
8
What’s Wrong with Canadian Academia?
Distinguished academics from across the country weigh in
10
Rockstar Philosophy by Jennifer Lewis
11
Trading Spaces by Justin Fraterman
12
Soul in the Circuitry by Brendan Wypich
An interview with robotics artist Norman White
FEATURES
14
Popular Politics by Carrie Fiorillo
A defense of the virtues of public opinion
17
The Grouch Effect by Ivor Tossell
Our cities are dying, and it’s because of the Children’s Television Network
20
Jacques Derrida: An Obituary by Caleb Yong
22
Docbusters by Andrea Janes
20
Last year, an onslaught of documentaries told us how to eat, what to watch
on TV and for whom to vote. Why did they fail?
26
Going it Alone by Dean Foster
Would the war in Iraq have been any more successful with UN approval?
28
Much Love by Isaac Stein
We often say that love knows no bounds. Do we mean it? The allure of polygamy
30
Speaking with Tongues by Clif Mark
When it comes to love, speaking different languages doesn’t hurt
32
LITERARY REVIEW
40
Haruki Murakami: Every Man Is an Island by Neil Rogachevsky
Japan’s most famous writer brings us deep into a “place that is no place.” The place
where love begins
42
Hunter S. Thompson: The Life and Death of Gonzo Journalism by Dave McGinn
44
Books by Philip Gordon & Jeremy Shapiro, Melissa P., Francis Fukuyama,
Paris Hilton, Jagdish Bhagwati, Bob Dylan and Gertrude Himmelfarb
Reviewed by Justin Fraterman, Joanna Baron, Carrie Fiorillo, Ira Wells, Dean Foster,
Christopher Trigg and Neil Rogachevsky
42
Cover illustration by
Clayton Hanmer
DEPARTMENTS
4
5
6
32
36
50
Contributors
Editors’ Letter
Letters
Dispatch from Abroad: Finding Iran by Richard Norman
Fiction: Woman and Writer by Michael Davidson
The World in Review by Danny Shenkman
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Contributors
Justin Fraterman (“Trading Spaces,” page
Clif Mark (“Speaking with Tongues,” page
11) graduated from McGill in 2004 with a
joint honours degree in history and political science, studying at the University of
Toronto and the Free University of Brussels
along the way. Last year, Fraterman edited
the McGill International Review. He is
currently a research assistant at U of T’s
Institute for European Studies.
30) is a native of Toronto’s west end and
a graduate student at L’Institut d’études
politique in Paris. He received his BA from
McGill, where he was awarded a Molson
fellowship to study political science in
France. Clif’s piece on Hegel’s interpretation
of Shakespeare appears in the 2005 edition
of Pensées: The Canadian Undergraduate
Journal of Philosophy.
Michael Davidson (“Woman and Writer,”
Rachel Ma is Entrepôt’s associate art direc-
page 36) studied economics at the University
of Chicago. His fiction has appeared in
Literary Potpourri, Whistling Shade and
Snow Monkey. He has also edited the online
journal The Open End. Born in Miami,
Michael now lives in Chicago, where he
writes and teaches math.
tor. She is currently completing her BFA
in new media at Ryerson University, and
has studied interactive media production at
Bournemouth University in England. She
is also a gallery assistant at the Toronto
Photographer’s Workshop (Gallery TPW) and
does web design for the Artist-Run Centers
and Collectives of Ontario.
Carrie Fiorillo (“Popular Politics,” page 14)
Jamie Campbell (“Speaking with Tongues,”
is a beauty editor at The Look, a Torontobased fashion magazine. She has written for
Saturday Night, the Toronto Star and The
Varsity, and has commented on the war in
Iraq for MuchMusic. Fiorillo studied political
science and philosophy at the University of
Toronto, and is keen to pursue a graduate
degree in political theory.
Adrian Milankov (“Much Love,” page 28)
will graduate this spring from Ryerson’s new
media program. His senior thesis focuses
on the world’s insatiable appetite for oil.
Milankov has worked as a photo editor
for Ryerson’s independent newspaper, The
Eyeopener. Many of Milankov’s photographs
can be viewed on his website, adrian.ca.
Andrea Janes (“Docbusters,” page 22)
graduated from the cinema studies program
at the University of Toronto, where she
was awarded the Norman Jewison Film
Fellowship. She completed a master’s
in humanities and social thought at the
Graduate Center of the City University of
New York. There, Janes studied documentary
theory and production and made a film.
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page 30) is a photography student in his
third year at Ryerson. Campbell’s pictures
have been featured in the UK photography quarterly, Buffalo. His work has also
appeared at Toronto and New York exhibitions. More on Campbell can be found
online at imagearts.ryerson.ca/jcampbell.
Dean Foster (“Going it Alone,” page 26) is
pursuing a master’s degree in global politics at the London School of Economics. He
graduated from the University of Manitoba
in 2004, where he was the news editor of
The Manitoban. Foster thinks campus life in
Canada would vastly improve if more students read The Wall Street Journal instead
of campus papers. Similarly, he is training to
become a cage fighter.
Clayton Hanmer (Cover) is a Toronto-based
illustrator and designer whose work has
appeared in the The Globe and Mail, the
Toronto Star and Cottage Life. Hanmer won
the grade nine art award in high school,
though his interest in severed heads and
brains developed later. In May, his work
will appear in an exhibition featuring some
of Canada’s best young illustrators at the
Steam Whistle brewery in Toronto. Visit his
website, claytonhanmer.com.
Editors’ Letter
I
n our first editors’ letter, introducing readers to Entrepôt, we
described “a void — a black hole in Canadian university culture
where a forum for original writing and creative thought should
be.” Against the parochialism of the student press, we envisioned
a magazine of excellent writing and big thinking, by and for
Canadian university students.
Since then, the boundaries of Entrepôt have become more
porous, or, as we like to say, dynamic. A student publication, we
have worked with graduates, dropouts and others unconnected to
academia. Resolutely Canadian, we have drawn contributors from
across North America and story ideas from around the world. We
have also, ambitiously and sometimes quixotically, tackled topics
probably better suited to professional publications.
We have few regrets about our evolution, for it has allowed us
to pack this warehouse of ideas with the best work we could find.
We are especially pleased with this issue. From Carrie Fiorillo’s
reflection on political debate (page 14) and Clif Mark’s discourse
on the universal language of love (page 30), to our new literary
review section, we feel that this issue is our best yet. We are delighted to feature some of Canada’s finest young artists, including
Christopher Hutsul, and on our cover, Clayton Hanmer. Over the
years we’ve come to a better appreciation of the aesthetic component of the magazine, especially recently, through the persistent
prodding of our committed and talented art directors, Brendan
Wypich and Rachel Ma.
In some ways, this issue is the culmination of three years of
work. Have we remained true to our mandate? If not, can we
consider this project a success? If, in some small way, Entrepôt
has contributed to intellectual reflection on campus, we will
consider ourselves satisfied. Ultimately, though, we cannot answer
these questions without your input. We look forward to hearing
from you.
Benjamin Leszcz
Neil Rogachevsky
Editors-in-Chief Benjamin Leszcz
Neil Rogachevsky
Art Director Brendan Wypich
Associate Art Director Rachel Ma
Senior Editors Carrie Fiorillo
Jordan Petty
Nancy Stephen
Mike Wagman
Assistant Editor Ira Wells
Contributing Editors Joanna Baron
Justin Fraterman
Gregory Levey
Richard Norman
Danny Shenkman
Web Design Matt Yanchyshyn
Publisher Benjamin Leszcz
National Representatives Rob Aoki (Vancouver)
Joel Trenaman (Winnipeg)
Ori Mandowsky (London)
Tovi Heillbrohn (Toronto)
Jesse Kaplan (Toronto)
Jordan Petty (Kingston)
Coby Shuman (Montreal)
Mike Wagman (Montreal)
Ira Lindenberg (Halifax)
For all ad inquiries, contact
Benjamin Leszcz
(416) 364-3333 ext.3068
[email protected]
Entrepôt acknowledges the
generous financial support of the following donors:
University Students’ Council (University of Western Ontario),
Project Funding Allocations Committee for Students (Ryerson
University), Students’ Administrative Council (University
of Toronto), Office of the Vice-President Students (York
University), Office of the Principal (Queen’s University),
Concordia Council on Student Life, Students’ Society McGill
University, King’s Student Union, Office of President Tom Traves
(Dalhousie University), Dalhousie Student Union
Entrepôt is published annually and is distributed, at no charge,
in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, London, Waterloo, Toronto,
Kingston, Montreal and Halifax.
ISSN 1705-379X (print edition)
ISSN 1705-3803 (online edition)
Printed in Canada
www.entrepot.net
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Letters
HAIL TO THE KING
Where, oh where, is any mention of the peerless ’20s-’50s star of both ukulele and steel
guitar, King Benny Nawahi, in Ron Haflidson’s study of the ukulele? [“With Ukulele
in Hand,” Spring 2004]. King Benny’s jazz
sense, ferocious rhythm and brilliant solos
took the music far beyond the popular craze
for Hawaiian “good time" sounds documented in Haflidson’s article.
John Bingham
Assistant Professor of History
Dalhousie University
Halifax
A MESSAGE ABOUT THE MEDIA
Mary Fowles’s fears of media centralization
[“Freedom of the Press?” Spring 2004], are
noble but overstated. She ignores the beneficial effects the Internet has had on the dissemination of alternative news and opinions,
forgetting that, in the span of five minutes,
one can read the gospels of both Mark Steyn
and Noam Chomsky. Her concerns could
grow more relevant if people become too
lazy to read multiple views. But, as the success of blogging demonstrates, that doesn’t
look like it is happening anytime soon.
Terry Howard
Vancouver
ROMANTIC PRIMITIVISM
Comparing North American to West African
life, Matt Yanchyshyn [“Expatriating," Spring
2004], praises the latter as more primal and
essentially human. No doubt he leads a cool
life in West Africa, but I'm skeptical about
whether the need to haggle, insinuate and
touch in all interactions spells a more human society, as Yanchyshyn suggests. The
assumption here is that our easy Western
capitalism obviates the truest parts of human
interaction. True enough, perhaps, but I can't
help but wonder if these intense practical
demands of life in West Africa might cause
inhabitants to forget other, no less human
goals. It's hard to be human wherever you
live. Yanchyshyn tries to hide this fact.
Veronique Smith-Dubé
Montreal
OUT OF LEFT FIELD
Jordan Petty’s analysis of the New Left [“The
Trouble with the New New Left,” Spring
2004] is seriously flawed. The crux of the
problem is Petty’s equation of mass protest
with mass movement. Petty ignores the fact
that a movement is not defined by the rare
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spectacle but by the daily work of organizers
and activists who fight for common objectives over a significant period of time. By
focusing on the protests, Petty misses out
on the vital political consequences brought
on by New Left political activism over the
recent years. For example, the awakening of
social democratic tendencies in many Latin
American countries, (especially in Venezuela), has been contingent on the support of
a range of activist movements within those
countries. In Canada, the leftward shift of
the NDP — and the positive response of the
Canadian electorate — was in part facilitated
by New Left efforts to radically alter the
structure and objectives of the party. And
as we speak, New Lefters are involved in
campaigns across North America, such as the
effort to help Wal-Mart employees unionize.
Far from falling into obscurity or “absurdity,”
the movement is as relevant as ever.
Simon Black
Former Federal NDP Candidate (2004)
New York City
DON’T DISCOUNT DEPARDIEU
Danny Shenkman is misguided when he
teasingly dismisses Gérard Depardieu [“The
World in Review,” Spring 2004]. Not a
memorable actor, eh? Is he referring to the
same man who so unforgettably portrayed
the wily hunchback in Jean de Florette? Who
dazzled us with his realistic rendition of a
16th century hustler-peasant in The Return
of Martin Guerre? Who helped bring the
three musketeers to a new generation with
his Porthos in The Man in the Iron Mask? A
whole great career shouldn’t be besmirched
because of that single ill-advised water-ski
scene in My Father the Hero.
Mark White
Toronto
TRUE PLEASURE
Congratulations on continuing this ambitious
project. It's very difficult to run an enterprise
like this successfully, but you guys are doing
a great job so far. Reading your magazine is
a pleasure and I look forward to many more
issues to come.
Nadine Burton
Montreal
Send letters to [email protected]. Please
include your full name, email address and
telephone number. We reserve the right to
edit for length and clarity.
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,
What s Wrong with Canadian Academia?
We asked distinguished academics from across the country to weigh in
They don't know what they want to be. Are they centers of critical scholarship, antidotes to
the dominant culture or co-opted training grounds that merely reinforce the current arrangement? The consumer model
favoured by so many undergraduates is just a symptom of this deeper confusion, rational under the prevailing conditions.
Universities are increasingly becoming social and economic gateways, forced to justify their cost-effectiveness with a
bankrupt language of excellence, rather than places that keep alive the tradition of free and fearless inquiry.
Mark Kingwell
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
The commercialization of universities and of research.
One aspect of this concerns
the areas of research that are valued by funding agencies and universities and this relates to the types of research that
women are often involved with. For example, the highest proportion of women applicants to NSERC are in the areas of
ecology and evolution. The grants in these areas tend to be low. On top of that, the grants given to women are on
average less than those given to men. This indicates to me that the research of women is still undervalued.
Judith H. Myers
Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia
They are all creatures of provincial governments. These public monopolies generate an
unfortunate sameness from coast to coast. Apart from a few exceptions such as Trinity Western, there is little genuine
pluralism in the Canadian academic world.
Tom Flanagan
Department of Political Science, University of Calgary
Research dictated by narrowly defined goals.
Research directed at specific issues needs to
be balanced by research into a diverse range of issues, for it is from the bolus of seemingly pointless research that the
inspiration comes to make progress on specific issues. My research is a case in point. For the past 10 or so years I have
been studying genomic imprinting in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, something most researchers didn't believe
existed in fruit flies. We showed that it did. We figured out how to clone fruit flies and suddenly there was a flurry of
attention because increasing the likelihood that clones will be healthy is potentially worth a lot of money to the biotech
industry. It is an advance that came out of seemingly pointless work.
Vett Lloyd
Department of Biology, Dalhousie University
Canadian academics, like most academics, are intellectually paralyzed by a devastating
combination of complacency and orthodoxy. Too many orthodoxies have grown up in the Academy,
both methodological and political. The contempt so many academics have for those with whom they disagree
methodologically or politically comes from a remarkable complacency, an uncritical trendiness that often prefers
posturing to creativity, and wraps too many trivialities and abstractions in turgid prose and 10-dollar words. The result
is a scholarly world that is surprisingly — and inexcusably — dull, intolerant, self-referential, brittle, insecure and out of
touch. Otherwise, things are fine.
Gil Troy
Department of History, McGill University
The effort of the government to make universities into job training centres
and to try to control the type of research that is being done. The government wants
to make the universities more relevant and more useful to society, but their effort backfires, leading to the demise of
the humanities and the rise of the trendiest topics with the shortest shelf-life. The university is no longer concerned
with eternal problems such as: What is just? What is the good society? Is democracy the best form of government? As
universities rely more and more on corporate funding, their intellectual independence is further eroded. Our challenge is
to remember that the university is there to create thinking and critical citizens, not trained seals.
Shadia B. Drury
Department of Political Science, University of Regina
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Deterioration in the calibre of incoming students. I'm in the last of my 44 years of
teaching. As I empty my files and reminisce, I find that I could never demand of students today what I used to. I'm
talking about the average student because the good students and poor ones are like they always were. Students today
have so many things competing for their attention. It's like my son said to me: “Had you been going to school at the
same time as me, where girls invite you to their room between classes and so on, you would have fired your calculus
book over the fence too." Students today work less hard, and grades are inflating to compensate. It’s a nasty thing.
Charlie Gallant
Department of Math, St. Francis Xavier University
Underfunding.
We have huge class sizes and libraries that aren't kept up. I think that the obvious crisis
in healthcare funding and the public perception of it has meant that every other public issue has been buried. The
federal funding has helped parts of what we do but it hasn't had any effect at all on operating expenses and simply how
we run the place. It's a mess.
Regna Darnell
Department of Anthropology, University of Western Ontario
The United States.
Americans lavish an unseemly amount of time, attention and money on their system
of post-secondary education. The glut of cash seduces American schools into providing sumptuous salaries, exotic
equipment and luxurious libraries. And what has all this profligacy wrought the Americans? Little, but that (1) 25
percent of Americans over the age of 25 have at least a bachelor's degree by contrast with 19 percent of Canadians, (2)
a gluttonous 50 of the world's top 100 universities are American compared to Canada's four (including 18 U.S. entries
above Canada's first), and (3) the Americans exercise an ostentatious kind of world leadership in the arts, sciences and
the professions gilt with a gaudy collection of Nobel prizes. Canada’s more prudent approach to the Academy is not only
good for the character of our students and professors but also for the moral fibre of the nation as whole. I would not
dream of changing course. Unless, of course, an Ivy League school were to phone.
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology, York University
Students. In my observation, only a minority of students bring with them the curiosity needed to acquire
genuine education (as opposed to training). Some will discover, with the help of their teachers, that the universities
offer a door onto the world and the mind that will remain open forever. But most will come wanting only a “useful”
education. Many will get it, and go away without ever dreaming that they missed the real thing.
Robert Fulford
Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto
Distrust of originality. Why was Lord Rutherford allowed to leave McGill shortly before he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for having fathered nuclear physics? I submit that because he was too original. Because of their preference
for mediocrity, our universities have plenty of professors who have never had a big idea of their own. Consequently, they
never transmit the explorer’s excitement to their students. Funding is sometimes denied to original (hence risky) projects,
while too many research grants are awarded to run-of-the mill (hence risk-free) projects. Once a federal funding agency
asked me whether a certain uninteresting project in mathematical ecology was doable. I answered ironically “Doubtless!”
Of course, the project was awarded the grant. The winning formula seems to be “Be timid or perish!” Humans are
eminently adaptable, and this is good. But it is equally true that dissent is the mother of progress, which is great. We
must run the risks associated with innovation if we wish to acquire new knowledge or a more just social order. Innovate
or stagnate!
Mario Bunge
Department of Philosophy, McGill University
- Interviews by Mike Wagman and Dave McGinn
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Dropping the knowledge: Pinhas at work on
the synthesizer in his Heldon days
Rockstar Philosophy
By Jennifer Lewis
Richard Pinhas is one of
France’s most progressive and
influential electronic musicians.
So why does he look like a
philosophy professor?
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The answer is simple: Pinhas is a philosophy prof, and when
the 53-year-old Frenchman isn’t in the classroom, he’s often in
the recording studio.
Pinhas, who creates his music using guitars, synthesizers and
computers, is highly experimental, distorting and manipulating
sounds to create a tridimentional soundscape: rhizomatic music,
or simply, music with no beginning, middle or end. Pinhas’s music is influenced largely by the theory of Gilles Deleuze, a French
theorist who, along with postmodern theorists Jean-François
Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, taught Pinhas in the ’60s, shaping his uncommon ideas about music. Pinhas was particularly
fascinated with Deleuze's concept of the “deterritorialization of
music”; the deconstruction of the systems that create melodies
and underlie nearly all music.
To achieve this deterritorialization, Pinhas relies on electronic
devices to take normal sounds and melodies and strip them of
all structure and codes, creating material in fusion. Each block
of sound interacts freely with the others, allowing the listener
to enter a new dimension, as if some part of the cosmos was
“A rhizome doesn’t begin and doesn’t end,
but is always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo”
(Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux)
now audible. By abandoning the harmonic axis, Pinhas’s music
enters a new realm of possibility in which music and ideas are
intertwined.
In spite of the apparent weightiness of the music which Pinhas
creates, he has been prolific, with over 15 albums to date. Most of
these come from his band Heldon, which he formed in 1974, the
year he abandoned his full time work in academia for the music
world. But some are solo releases, including 1977’s Rhyzosphere
and 1994’s formative album, Cyborg Sally. More recently, Pinhas
collaborated with Schizotrope, a group formed as a tribute to
Deleuze following his death in 1995. Pinhas’s musical career is
punctuated with stints back in the academic world. His fascination with time and repetition led him to publish many books on
the subject, including Les Larmes de Nietzsche and his collaborations with Deleuze, Mille Plateaux and Francis Bacon: The Logic
of Sensation.
Pinhas continued to study under Deleuze until 1987, recording
music and writing books with him throughout. Inspired by Deleuze’s conception of a music deprived of hierarchy and structure,
Pinhas continues to push the boundaries of music, challenging
our minds and imaginations.
Rhyzosphere (1977)
Cyborg Sally (1994)
Trading Spaces
Bustling wharves, frenetic bazaars, pregnant storehouses
and multilingual bourse halls. These were the hallmarks of
17th century entrepôts; cities that were conduits for the
circulation of goods, capital and information throughout
the world, and precursors to contemporary globalization.
Timber and grain from the Baltic, silver and sugar from
the new world, coffee from the Arabian peninsula, cloves
from the Moluccas and pepper and textiles from India
moved through these trade cities, stretching from Danzig
on the Baltic Sea, via London, Amsterdam and Mocha, all
the way to Canton in the Far East.
The economies of these cities were often exclusively
centred on trade. Merchants, interpreters, craftsmen and
bureaucrats all played a crucial role in developing the
shipping and receiving of materials. This is why we refer to
whole cities as entrepôts, more than just physical emporiums where goods were processed and stored.
The role of the entrepôt was not limited to the processing of raw materials for trade. New ideas, powerful scientific innovations, unusual beasts, objets d'art and alien
flora and fauna came to these cities from the far corners
of the earth.
The new and unfamiliar often had profound influences
on local knowledge systems and regional sensibilities.
At the beginning of the 17th century, for example, trade
customs on the Indian subcontinent were radically altered
when European joint stock companies, such as the Dutch
and English East India Companies, introduced a new paradigm of mercantile exchange there.
In the next century, English country gentlemen built
curiosity cabinets filled with trinkets, flowers and bones
from what they considered to be exotic and savage lands.
A fine curiosity cabinet became a sign of social importance. By the 18th century, foreign and global things had
become fashionable.
These days, it is often said that economic and cultural
globalization is the innovation of our time. But the history
of the entrepôt tells us otherwise. The contemporary process of global integration retraces lines that were etched
into our cultural cartography hundreds of years ago.
–Justin Fraterman
All images courtesy of Cuneiform Records
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Soul in the Circuitry
An interview with robotics artist Norman White. By Brendan Wypich
NORMAN WHITE has been called the godfather of
whole thing. And how you perceive the pattern is as important
as what is actually creating the pattern.
robotic art. He produced his first major work in
1969 and has since shown his work throughout HOW HAS YOUR BACKGROUND IN BIOLOGY INFLUENCED YOUR ART?
North America and Europe. He has also played a To me, the thing that makes robotics come alive is that we are
pioneering role in making Canada a key player in constantly trying to explore the complex information systems
the world of electronic arts, helping to establish that nature has devised, like DNA. Nature has created ingenious ways of defining organisms so that information can be
the Integrated Media Program at the Ontario Col- passed from one generation to another. Robotics ties into this
lege of Art & Design in 1978. Throughout his ca- intuitively. You’re building creatures that have a life, a will of
reer, White has focused on uncovering the nature their own, that are somehow based upon pre-established charbut there’s nothing to say they have to stick with
of technology. I interviewed the artist at his studio acteristics,
those characteristics.
in Durham, Ontario.
TECHNOLOGY IS OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH CONTROL. HOW DOES YOUR
YOU’VE DESCRIBED YOUR WORK AS “EMERGENT ART.” WHAT DOES ARTWORK ADDRESS THIS IDEA OF CONTROL?
Most people use technology to expand or enhance their control
THIS MEAN?
Emergent art is art that discovers itself in the process of interacting with the viewer. Something happens in that interaction
which is not necessarily intended by the artist, and hopefully,
the experience is just as exciting for the artist as it is for the
viewer. Mathematicians and scientists speak of emergence with
respect to chaotic systems. Chaos here doesn’t mean randomness; it refers to phenomena that are so rich and intertwined
that they seem random, but really the patterns underlie the
First Tighten Up on the Drums
(1969). White’s first major
electronic project, built for
the 1969 E.A.T. exhibition,
Some More Beginnings. Using several hundred vintage
digital integrated circuits,
he created a machine that
generated shimmering light
patterns similar to those
seen at the bottoms of
swimming pools. Materials:
plexiglas, custom electronics, and small neon bulbs.
Owned by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
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over the world. I do the opposite. I use technology to increase
the arm’s length of myself from the behaviour of the piece.
The point of using technology is to loosen my control over the
machine, so it has more of its own life and decision-making.
HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY FUNCTION AS AN ARTISTIC MEDIUM?
If you are walking along the streets these days, the chances of
tripping over a VCR or TV someone has thrown out are pretty
Funky Isn’t Junky (1982).
An installation of five or
six crude sound-producing machines synchronized
by a conductor machine.
Created using mostly pre1940s technology, the work
appears to break down at
the end of the sequence,
dramatizing the vulnerability of what White calls
“machine-kind.” Materials:
wood, motors, steel, plexiglas, aluminum, speaker,
custom electronics.
a
b
The Helpless Robot (1987-96). This interactive work does not have a motor.
Instead, it attempts to assess and predict human behaviour by asking
people (in a synthesized voice) to move it as it would like. It also speaks
Spanish and French. Materials: plywood, angle-iron, proximity sensors,
modified 80386 computer, and custom electronics. Owned by the Agnes
Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario.
good. This is the stuff of our time: the free stuff. It makes perfect sense for artists to gravitate towards the stuff that’s just
there lying on the street and to use it in their artwork.
WHAT’S YOUR OPINION OF LEADING EDGE TECHNOLOGY?
One of the big myths is that in order to be leading edge you need
a $4000 computer. For me, the little chips found in common
microcomputers, such as your wristwatch, are capable of huge
amounts of computing power, and they only cost seven dollars.
A lot of the stuff I build uses those computer chips. That’s leading edge for me. The thing I have a problem with isn’t so much
leading edge technology, it’s consumerist glamour. Where a
piece of hardware is more attractive because it impresses other
people at the office rather than because it possesses any power
you really need. It just looks sexy as hell.
HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH BREAKDOWNS WITH YOUR WORK?
To me the breakdown is part of the chaotic system that I embrace. It’s part of the excitement that is lent to the piece. It’s
also the thing that drives curators crazy. If a work breaks down,
it is part of what the work is about. That’s another characteristic that I like about robotics: it reflects our own vulnerabilities.
A machine that has moving parts will eventually start to wear
out. It has a finite life cycle, just like us.
c
a) White working the bugs out of a circuit. b) The doorbell to White’s home
studio. c) Outside White’s place, “The Normill”.
ONCE YOU REPLACE A MECHANICAL PART OF THE WORK, IS IT STILL
THE SAME ARTWORK?
In the old way of thinking, the artwork is framed by its specific
materials. For me, an artwork is always in process. You do
whatever you have to do to keep that process going. Even the
concepts related to the work will change. My Helpless Robot
has gone through a number of different variations over the
years. That’s great. It’s a process in itself.
WHY ARE PEOPLE ATTRACTED TO ROBOTS AS SIMULATIONS OF
NATURAL LIFE?
What is this fetish with simulation? The first response that comes
to mind is that we like playing God. We like the idea of generating creatures that are extrapolations of our own mentalities,
and seeing them take life — somehow complementing our own
sensibilities. Secondly, through simulation we can put things in
a different framework and get a new view of the world.
DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR ROBOTS TO BE ALIVE?
Yes, in a very rudimentary sort of way. Insofar as they are able
to surprise me and do things that were not intended, I consider
them alive. You don’t have to build randomness into them; you
just program them to take cues from the environment, which is
sufficiently chaotic that they will be flooded with information
and respond with actions you never intended. Like humans,
the information surrounding robots is as much a part of their
personality as are their physical components.
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Christopher Hutsul
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Popular Politics
Carrie Fiorillo on the virtues of public opinion
S
eptember 11 made obvious a human fact noted some
time ago by Aristotle; we are political animals. But not
necessarily smart ones.
In the aftermath of those horrific attacks one couldn’t enjoy
a pint in a bar without stumbling into a less than sophisticated
discussion about the most sophisticated of topics: terrorism.
The questions sparked by 9/11 are endless: How should the
United States respond to terrorism? How has this event altered
the international system? How would the world deal with
emerging non-state actors like Al Qaeda and their propensity
to use all means necessary to achieve their goals? How can the
world deal with states sponsoring terrorism? Can the UN adapt
to the changing political climate? What can we do about weapons of mass destruction? Islamic fundamentalism? The Middle
East? The questions go on.
Foreign policy had planted itself in popular consciousness.
The events of 9/11 shook the heretofore mostly naïve North
American populace from their cocoons of safety, resulting in
pop politics — foreign policy fodder for breakfast, lunch and
dinner, as people scrambled to make sense of it all. Often this
resulted in anger and blame. The mass protests that met American engagement in Iraq reminded me of footage I had seen
from the Vietnam War era; protesters taking to the streets in an
orgy of self-righteousness as they sought to defend what they
perceived as justice.
Everyone had something to say. It seemed as though, overnight, experts in political science emerged from where brothers,
teammates and co-workers had been. But how many of those
experts had unpacked the heady issues of the day? How many
had striven to understand the complex interplay of events unfolding in Iraq?
I venture to say not many. Thoughtfulness is not a necessary component of any opinion. This statement may sound
simple. But if you think it through to its consequence,
that many people argue without having any knowledge to
inform their opinions, debating about politics seems like
an exercise in psychology, often revealing more about the
people debating than the subject of debate.
Fast forward to the American election. It doesn’t take a
Michael Moore blockbuster to tell you that pop politics has
been in, and thoughtfulness out. A divided America chose its
heroes. The left-wing picked pop culture, with the Dixie Chicks
as America’s newest political princesses, protesting Bush and
the war in Iraq with an earnestness that folk singers seem to
capture so well, while P. Diddy and Ben Affleck cheered on
John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention. The rightwing chose politics, with Rudolph Giuliani colourfully reminding America not to lose sight of the vicious attacks that put
them in this predicament in the first place. Meanwhile, across
North America, people clambered to pick sides, pitting friends
against one another, trapping them in hostile conversations
that risked alienating the participants while getting them no
closer to the truth.
Canadians are especially prone to thoughtlessness. Long accustomed to reaping the rewards of being America’s neighbour
without having to share in any of the costs that that position
should entail, Canadians represent the peak of intellectual softness, granting themselves immunity on any ill-founded reference to the U.S. The war on terror has unveiled this ugly aspect
of Canadian society, this knee-jerk disdain for Americans that
borders on racism. Someone told me a pertinent anecdote the
other day. She said a friend’s father had threatened not to go
to his daughter’s wedding because it was in the U.S. Too bad
semantics haven’t caught up with Canadians. There is no word
for racism when it’s directed at a nationality. Whatever the
word, it sure is revealing of our national psychology.
But this thoughtlessness is not without consequence. Our selfinterest really is at stake. Note the lack of thoughtful debate
during last year’s summer election. Health care, supposedly
the most important issue to Canadians, was hardly discussed.
Instead, any candidate that ventured to suggest a modification
to our current system was lambasted for being American. Issues
were hijacked by leaders and talking heads who painted the
choices in stark black and white. You are either Canadian and
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LONG
ACCUSTOMED TO REAPING
THE REWARDS OF BEING
AMERICA’S NEIGHBOUR
WITHOUT SHARING ANY
OF THE COSTS,
CANADIANS REPRESENT
THE PEAK OF
INTELLECTUAL SOFTNESS.
THE WAR ON TERROR
HAS UNVEILED CANADIANS’
KNEE-JERK DISDAIN
FOR AMERICANS
good or American and bad. Witness Prime Minister Paul Martin who
skilfully played upon Canadian prejudices by basing much of his
campaign on the notion that Conservative leader Stephen Harper is
basically American. And so, despite the proclaimed dire need for a
change in government, Canadians re-elected the Liberals out of fear,
affirming that the Liberal’s anti-American rhetoric was successful.
People have opinions and they cling to them with fervour, looking
everywhere for justification and nowhere for stimulation. It’s rational to want your world-view validated. Who doesn’t want to feel
like they are part of the majority opinion? Debating about politics
can be like preaching to the converted, just make sure the people on
your side outnumber the ones on the opposing side and you’ll feel
understood. The right-wingers nod their heads when their brethren
speak; the left-wingers do the same (they also chant and march and
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have die-ins together; considerably more fun).
But rarely is an informed position to be found.
Like a diamond, it’s rare and precious.
So debates are everywhere but debating is futile,
each side is merely reciting lines they’ve heard or
spoken somewhere before. I got into the swing of
things myself right around the time the Americans went into Iraq. I wrote a column supporting
the American position and became the target of
a tidal wave of predictable challenges. And I, in
turn, became the predictable hawk. I didn’t so
much mind my position. When attacked at dinner
parties I would spew my speech via rote memory.
I no longer had to think. I had heard their arguments so many times before that my answers stood
at attention, waiting for the signal to emerge full
steam ahead. All I had to do was form the sounds
with my mouth. And so I stopped.
For most of the past year I have refused to engage in popular politics, to participate in so-called
discussions or debates that resemble nothing of
the sort. I have preferred instead to let my mind
unpack these issues on its own, free from the base
and the bombastic, from those whose influences I
feel are pernicious.
But as I rethink this position and reflect on
whether or not I am any closer to the truth because of it, I realize that maybe I’m thinking about
things the wrong way. For what is a debate? It is
not only an attempt to understand an issue objectively, but it’s also an attempt to explore the
subjective positions of those arguing, hopefully
allowing the latter to inform the former. So now
I listen and ask myself: What is this person really
trying to say? What am I really trying to say?
After all, can most people’s opinions be dismissed as no more than the defective ramblings
of ill-informed positions? We are tempted to
think condescendingly of mass public opinion
but certainly Socrates didn’t. Men’s opinions
weren’t arbitrary but informative. They served as
the starting point for his intellectual explorations.
When attempting to understand justice, Socrates
began with what people think about justice. And
through this process he gained not only insight
into the people with whom he was talking but
he also gained an understanding of justice itself.
Ordinary opinions, no matter how knee-jerk,
showed the way.
So 9/11, the war on terror, the war in Iraq and
a host of other issues that entered popular consciousness over three years ago, have once again
resumed their rightful place in my life as the issues
worth thinking and talking about. Now however,
I will listen more and try to avoid thoughtless debating. I will remember that no debate is entirely
devoid of meaning. Every opinion provides insight
into both the person expressing it and the thing
being investigated. And, with every expression of
opinion comes the possibility of knowledge.
T HE G ROUCH E FFECT
Or, our cities are dying, and I blame the
Children’s Television Workshop. By Ivor Tossell
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I AM, AT THIS MOMENT, looking out my window into the
And so our cities were built out instead of up. We might
backyards of houses I’ll never own. Not because they’re big blanch at the excesses of modern-day suburbia, where evhouses or new houses or especially nice houses; I just happen erything seems to be triple-sized just because it can be, but
to be sitting in Toronto, and so are they.
that’s missing the point. Except for that old kernel downtown,
As the seconds tick by, their prices increase, while my net Canadian cities are all suburban in different scales. They are
worth has dropped by the price of lunch in the last hour alone. unwalkable, spaced-out, mall-centric, cul-de-sac-addled, GroAdmittedly, there are more lucrative ways to spend one’s life cery-Gateway-atrophied wastelands. The rise of the quintessenthan writing for magazines (especially this one). And there’s tial suburbs that came in the ’50s and ’60s only amplified this
another problem — if you want to work in media, it helps to live trend. It was an extension of Canadian city life not a reversal.
in a big city. In fact, there are a great many careers that benefit
So what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong is that we changed
from residence in a big city. But now that I’ve decided that my our minds. Our culture shifted. Suburbs went from happening
life needs a big city, it seems the big city has decided it doesn’t to horrifying, from swank to stigmatized, and the downtowns
have much use for me. I don’t think I’m alone here either.
of our few big cities have become insufferably chic — and now
Just in time for the arrival of a generation raised to covet everyone wants in. The trouble is that we built more suburbs
urban living, cities have become look-but-don’t-touch proposi- than downtowns, by just a few factors of 10. We built our cities
tions, their properties, rent-but-don’t-own. Their populations one way, and now we want them another. And that’s a problem.
increasingly drawn mostly from the top income brackets,
walkable centres gentrifying, and ballyhooed diversity seeping
WHERE DID THIS BLIGHT of trendiness come from? Let
away from the centre to the affordable but desolate edges. At me posit two sources, only one of which involves muppets.
the edges, big cities lose the urban design that makes them
In 1961, in the midst of the suburban boom, with block
unique. And at their cores, which are unique, they’re becoming after block of inner-city slum being razed for towering megaprecious. Toronto, my adopted home, is becoming a boutique projects, Jane Jacobs laid out a powerful image of what a city
city around me.
should be in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The
Here’s the problem, and I think it’s damned straightforward: book became planning dogma for a generation. Then, in 1969,
our cities have too much outside and too little inside. This isn’t there arrived what was essentially a TV version of the book,
just a Toronto problem, but one that’s endemic across the coun- and it was called Sesame Street. The people at the Children’s
try. A city’s design will reflect not the era when it was founded, Television Workshop might have thought they were teaching
but the era when it boomed. Most Canadian cities date back to the three Rs, but really, they were indoctrinating three-yearthe late 1800s, and have quaint stone downtowns to match, olds into modern urbanism.
but our cities' real growth spurts arWe can save some space here by
rived with the baby boom in the late
making, I believe, the wholly accuNSTEAD OF WISHING WE LIVED rate assertion that the book and the
’40s. The big urban idea for the first
two-thirds of the century was fairly
kids' show bear exactly the same
IN GARDENS OR TWEE LITTLE
simple; when building a city, try to
message. It’s uncanny. The show,
VILLAGES WE SHOULD EMBRACE after all, is about a city street, and
pretend it’s not a city.
This thinking, which sprang from
triumphally so. If someone would
THE CITY NESS OF OUR CITIES
the wretched cities of the industrial
tell us how to get to this street, said
revolution, with their smoke and
the show, life would be fine (barsqualor, was that cities are nasty, smelly things, and in plan- ring my creepy suspicion that if I actually got there, the mupning them, we should spread them out and make them as green pets would forbid me from ever leaving). Jacobs, for her part,
and leafy as possible. Anything grassy was good. Giant con- frames her book as a lengthy tribute to the street she lived on
crete towers were thought to be progress, as long as they were in Greenwich Village, which comes off seeming lovely but just
built in the middle of a park. Big-and-shiny eventually arrived as distant from reality.
as compliments to green-and-leafy — a modern twist, but the
When you boil them down, both Jacobs’ book and Sesame
idea was the same: keep it new and clean. And then the car Street are reading the same manifesto. It goes something like
arrived in force, the population exploded, and everything fell this. Instead of looking at the grimy cities around us and
into place. What better expedient for spreading out a city than wishing we lived in gardens or twee little villages, we should
a vast car-owning population?
embrace the city-ness of our cities. Hanging out on the front
I
,
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steps of tenements with the neighbourhood kids, instead of
fairy-tale gardens, is actually a great way to grow up. Concrete
sidewalks are often better than grass parks. Tenements are better than towers. Grunginess is better than sterility. Diversity in
all its forms is good, even if it’s a little off-putting at first. You
shouldn’t need a car, because you can walk places. Walking
happens on sidewalks, and sidewalks are the best part of cities.
That’s where you’ll find the people that you meet, when you’re
walking down the street, when you’re walking down the street
each day. Now that’s a city.
This is Sesame Street urbanism; an embrace of grit for its
own sake. It turned the liabilities of close contact, diversity and
anonymity, so noxious in bygone times, into assets. It turned
North American city living from a fact of life into a lifestyle. It
flourished in pop culture. The grittier a city got (think New York
in its crime-riddled phase), the stronger its romance became,
even if this dissuaded people from moving in and taking part,
ogling instead from afar. It was the grouch effect and Oscar was
the ultimate urbanist, loving nothing better than the ultimate
urban artifact, trash.
Sesame Street wasn’t the only show to take Jane Jacobs up
on her ideal, but it was certainly the only show I was watching
in the early ’80s that had pointed ideas about urban politics.
Whether we knew it or not, it left us knowing what we were
looking for, a real, honest to goodness city.
EXCEPT, OF COURSE, there’s not enough honest to goodness city to go around. Here’s a secret about Toronto: it’s tiny.
There’s really not much of it to be had. If you came to town
to take some photos, and maybe take in some of the city’s old
ethnic neighborhoods or new large concrete things, you could
do it in an afternoon’s walking tour. Everything that people
point to when they hold up Toronto as a model of this or that
is packed into the middle.
Those dense Sesame Street cityscapes predate the boom,
when cities were built tight and unpleasant. When the boom
happened in Canada, tight, unpleasant cities had gone out of
vogue, so our cities went sprawling off every which way instead. Not only are these new neighborhoods not built for oldschool city living, they’re built to thwart it. So then old-school
city living becomes cool, and lo and behold, they’re not making
that stuff anymore. Bricks and mortar have a certain permanence, and once you’ve built a neighbourhood on a spaced-out
model, it’s mighty hard to ever change it. Since everything’s
been built on the suburban model for 60 years, walkable city
blocks become a huge commodity — a fetish, even — and up go
the prices.
The grouch effect means that anything with a connection to
old city grunge becomes sexy. Old warehouses become luxury
lofts. Old factories become glass-and-brick magazine offices.
Buildings whose former atmospheres meant dying young have
become icons of living well. Their inhabitants relish the notion
of that old city toughness somehow rubbing off on them. We
seem possessed by an urge to reach out and touch our industrial
past, but only once it’s been properly sanitized.
Meanwhile, the real toughness to the inner city is being driven
out by the same money that’s rehabilitating those factory lofts.
So is the real diversity (and for many people, diversity is tough).
Economic diversity is linked to social and ethnic diversity. The
ethnic communities that pad Toronto’s reputation are found
less and less in the middle of town, where they once were;
they’ve bought new cars and moved to the suburbs. (Perhaps
other cultures have yet to take the urban fetish to heart the way
the Western mainstream has.)
The multicultural experiment that gave birth to our urban
mystique is now being played out in the suburbs — successfully,
but often without the benefit of a human urban fabric that good
planning affords. Either way, that’s where much of the action is
now, out there, and bully for them. But those burbs are distant,
remote and inaccessible to those of us who moved to the city to
get just that kind of exposure by walking the sidewalks.
Perhaps the future is Scarborough, then. Poor Scarborough,
the much-maligned burg at the eastern end of Toronto, home
of the daily drive-by. Scarborough today is raw in the same
kind of way that the downtown used to be. Raw in the way that
people with money tend to avoid. Too much violence, too much
unreconstructed foreign-ness. (A Scarborough city councillor
recently set off a public fury by bemoaning the fact that white
people are moving out of his ward.) My bet is that this rawness is going to translate into cultural production; something
interesting, cool and liveable. But never walkable. Scarborough
will never be able to compliment the older parts of town as an
urban hub, because it simply wasn’t built that way.
So here I am, back where I started, staring at the houses
across the way and wondering, Oscar, what have you done? In
your nasty cuteness, you’ve made the old city so adorable that
we’ve hugged the life out of it. Jane Jacobs herself moved in a
few streets over from where I sit now, and look what happened.
We’ve squeezed prices through the roof, all the while making
me wonder if it’s really worth paying for in the first place. It’s
the observer effect; when everyone piles in, hoping to live the
dream, the dream packs up and moves to Scarborough. Is it
possible that our postwar cities will ever be rebuilt to match the
Jacobs ideal? I doubt it. Better to work on lowering expectations for the next generation to come along. Production will be
starting soon on Sesame Slum.
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Jacques Derrida:
An Obituary
By Caleb Yong
Image courtesy of Jane Doe Films
AFTER
A PRODIGIOUS CAREER of teaching
and writing, Jacques Derrida died of cancer last
year at the age of 74. Derrida’s work — 45 published
books translated into 22 languages — has been the
object of much academic admiration and scorn, and
has inspired some of the most provocative philosophical debates of the 20th century.
From his studies at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris, through graduate work at Harvard, and later,
professorships at the Sorbonne and UC Irvine, Derrida
honed his unique sensitivity to the covert and unnoticed ways that prejudice manifests itself in literature,
philosophy and academic writing in general.
It is likely that much of Derrida’s sensitivity to
prejudice results from his experiences of being marginalized or witnessing the marginalization of others. Born in 1930 in French Algeria into an assimilated Sephardic Jewish family, Derrida was exposed
to prejudice at early age. Under orders of the Vichy
Regime, Derrida was expelled from the state-run
school at age 10 after being told by a teacher that
“French culture is not made for little Jews." Similarly, Derrida's Algerian roots made him a kind of
foreigner in Paris and his religion and class made
him a relative outsider in Algeria as well. As such,
it is no surprise that Derrida’s work often focuses
on how one relates to cultural, philosophical and
sexual differences.
Derrida’s greatest philosophical accomplishment
was developing deconstruction, a controversial
method of evaluating texts designed to expose the
prejudices inherent within language that we are either incapable or unwilling to acknowledge.
For example, much of Derrida’s later writing,
including The Gift of Death, Specters of Marx and
The Other Heading, deconstructs the concept of responsibility as it is used in a variety of discourses.
Indeed, invocations to “act responsibly" pervade
contemporary political, social and religious rhetoric.
As such, the idea of being ethically conscientious is
deeply entrenched within everyday conversations:
we speak of acting responsibly all the time. Yet,
depending on the source of these invocations (put
plainly, to whom one is asked to be responsible), this
word can take on completely different meanings.
As Derrida suggests, there is no single definition of
what it means to do the right thing. In The Gift of
Death, he writes:
[In] everyday discourse, in the exercise of justice…is
a lexicon concerning responsibility that can be said
to hover vaguely about a concept that is nowhere
to be found.
Although we often appeal to the concept of responsibility, deconstruction forces us to confess that
we often don’t have slightest idea what we mean.
Due to this hyper-attentiveness to language,
Derrida’s works are very complex and difficult to
understand. Consequently, many have questioned
the validity of Derrida’s ideas; if Derrida knew what
he was talking about, critics argue, he would be
able to articulate it clearly and simply. Such critics
fail to recognize, however, the main tenet of deconstruction: because of the innate prejudices woven
into language, the meaning of any text is unstable
and necessarily collapses in on itself. Derrida’s
highly self-conscious writing style must be read
as an attempt to render this process of destabilization explicit; in order to deconstruct the writing of
another person, Derrida must deconstruct his own
work as well.
Another confusing aspect of Derrida’s work has
been how to categorize his political affiliation.
Outside the realm of academic scholarship, Derrida was an inspired political activist. Amongst his
many humanitarian projects: Derrida aided Czech
dissidents during the Velvet Revolution; he petitioned the school system in France; and he worked
towards the liberation of Nelson Mandela. Yet, despite these efforts, deconstruction has been heavily
criticized by the left as an impediment to political
mobilization. As such critics correctly point out,
political movements need clear and unequivocal
slogans, not inaccessible queries into the limits of
language and communication. How can one rally
support for a cause while deconstructing that cause
at the same time?
Derrida himself felt that he was often misread by
the public at large and misrepresented by the media.
When asked about the most widely held misconception about his work in an interview with the L.A.
Weekly, Derrida replied:
That I'm a skeptical nihilist who doesn't believe in
anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, and
text has no meaning. That's stupid and utterly
wrong, and only people who haven't read me say
this…[Deconstruction] was conceived to dismantle
precisely this philosophy for which everything is
language. Anyone who reads my work with attention
understands that I insist on affirmation and faith...
Regardless of how one gauges the validity of
Derrida’s work, it is difficult to overstate the magnitude of Derrida's impact on the world of ideas.
His exceptional voice will be missed.
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Last year, an onslaught of
documentaries told us how
to eat, what to watch on TV
and for whom to vote.
Andrea Janes explains
why they failed
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Jamie Campbell
T
he year 2004 was a significant one for the political
documentary. Buoyed by the
enthusiasm surrounding films
such as Uncovered, Going Upriver and
Fahrenheit 9/11, it was enticing to
believe that the barrage of anti-Bush
docs might reach and sway voters in
significant numbers. But on the heels
of the U.S. election, it has become
easier to doubt the effectiveness of
the political documentary, since obviously such films did not oust Bush
from power. Many political advocacy
docs are well-produced, engaging and
relevant. So why don’t they seem to be
able to contribute to social change in a
significant way?
In an article for The New Yorker last
year, film critic Louis Menand homed
in on the fundamental
paradox of political
advocacy docs. While
Menand lauds Robert
Greenwald's Outfoxed
for fighting against
mainstream media’s
right-wing cheerleading, he notes that the
film “ends weakly,
with a call for the people to rise up and protest [shots of tiny
groups of picketers with hand-lettered
signs] and with similar exhortations
from the usual exhorters.” The note of
been-there-done-that weariness with
which he describes the usual exhorters
highlights the paradoxical position of
documentary as a form of activism;
films attempting to spur social progress
are most often embraced by people who
already agree with the ideals espoused
in such a film. Outfoxed's conclusion
affirms this paradox by appealing to
activists, not the common viewer.
Advocacy docs often fail to create
any real social change because they
operate in a tightly circumscribed
loop of production, distribution and
exhibition, circulating mainly among
filmmakers and activists. With few
exceptions, these films preach to a tiny
group of converts, only too eager to
repeat the same tired refrains of which
Menand is so critical. Advocacy documentary-making is generally defined
as an alternative, counter-hegemonic
practice. The crucial question is whether
or not this is a positive thing. Docmakers have defined themselves against
the mainstream for so long that they
almost expect their films to be marginalized. However, because they aim for
social change, it is especially important
for doc filmmakers to resist obscurity.
No doubt, it’s time to break away from
alternative practice and begin courting
a mainstream audience.
There are two critical factors that
determine a film's ability to crack the
mainstream: accessibility and appeal.
Accessibility is a factor of distribution, or simply, the number of theatres
showing the film. Appeal is of equal
system it opposes? It is helpful to look
at the ways other independent media
outlets utilize alternative and nonprofit ownership models to maintain
their integrity while generating additional income. National Public Radio
in the U.S., for example, operates with
the help of a U.S. $225-million bequest
from the late philanthropist Joan Kroc,
in addition to its listener support; Ms.
Magazine is supported by the nonprofit Feminist Majority Foundation,
and countless other publications disseminate a fairly radical message while
being at least partially supported by
advertising revenue. The lesson is clear.
Independent media outlets generally
need two things in order to survive:
flexibility regarding advertising and
corporate sponsorship, and donations
or endowments. In
fact, the most realistic
plan may often be to
hook up with mainstream outfits. Docmakers may have to
admit that they stand
to benefit from linking up with corporate
distributors.
In August 2004, Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein was
quoted in The New York Times saying,
“I think we’re beginning to see audiences’ fascination with non-fiction
when it’s done well,” assuring readers
that docs would “continue to take up
more space at the multiplexes.” However, for every executive who thinks
docs are going to continue to bring
in big revenue, there are many who
do not. John Hegeman, president of
Lions Gate Entertainment (distributors of Fahrenheit 9/11), predicted in
October 2004, that over the holidays,
“escapism [will be] the number one
thing people are looking for,” adding
he had no plans to distribute political
docs over the Christmas season. This
statement underlines how unreliable profit-driven distributors are. If
documentarians control distribution
they can override the market-dictated
whimsy of capricious releasing com-
Docmakers cannot blame audiences,
distributors or conservatives. They need
to look at their own work and figure out
what's going wrong
if not greater importance, because no
matter how many theatres are playing
the doc, it will only survive if it can
hold the attention of the masses.
Distribution is intimately connected
with power and money, things most
small-scale documentarians lack. Josh
Kalin, a member of the non-profit
video activist collective Paper Tiger,
understands the importance and the
difficulty of distributing advocacy
docs, “It’s definitely frustrating when
you make a great movie and realize
that almost nobody is ever going to see
it,” he says. “Distribution is definitely
the hardest part of video activism,
especially when you’re dealing with
limited resources.”
A major obstacle for many documentarians seeking to improve their
financial situation is ideology. How
can a film critical of capitalism accept
financial support from facets of the
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23
panies and conservative theatre owners who refuse to book the films.
The key point to remember here is
that often, supply can create demand
and not the other way around. Corporate executives may claim audiences
are genuinely looking for escapism this
Christmas season, or they may be using marketing campaigns to convince
audiences that they are looking for
escapism. Disney's refusal to distribute
Fahrenheit 9/11 demonstrates that in
the film industry, demand does not
necessarily shape supply. It's likely that
Disney refused to distribute Moore's
film because of its anti-American message, not because it wouldn't make
money. Linking up with major distributors can make a doc subject to the
ideological whims of a corporation and
can ultimately pose much difficulty in
getting a film to the public.
Traditionally, far fewer people see
docs than feature films. According to
The Hollywood Reporter, “[Mainstream]
audience appetite for the year’s many
documentaries critiquing corporate
see what comes of it. Over the next four
years they need to prove their mettle as
filmmakers; they need not blame audiences, distributors, or conservatives.
They should look at their own work
and find out what they can do to bring
it to the general audience. This means
allying themselves with people, not
carving out a lonely perch from which
to observe and chastise them.
In Viewers Like You? How Public
Television Failed the People, author
Laurie Ouellette claims that PBS alienates a mass of viewers through its
adherence to highbrow programming.
How can this “oasis of the vast wasteland” serve any purpose if it remains
focused on cultivating the same audience over and over, the tiny sliver of
upper middle class professionals who
keep it alive? Docs face a similar challenge. Ouellette says that docs are often
geared to the relatively affluent and
well-educated PBS crowd, rather than
the poorer, less educated people they
tend to document. Even if they are not
overtly aimed at such audiences, they
The prevailing attitude seems to be that
if docs suddenly appealed to the masses,
their purpose would be defeated
behaviour and the war in Iraq was
miniscule… Super Size Me was in 106th
place according to a boxofficemojo.com
ranking. Other documentaries that attracted critical attention this year such
as The Corporation and Control Room
remained relatively marginal at the
box office.” Yet Fahrenheit 9/11 was
immensely successful. It is difficult to
tell how the other films may have fared
if they had enjoyed the same distribution as Moore's film. Weinstein might
have been right when he said that
there may be a real market for docs,
but that theory will go untested as long
as mainstream distribution companies
control access to major markets.
Increased distribution alone won’t be
enough to court mass audiences. Docs
still need to grab viewers’ attention. If
documentarians challenge themselves
to see how good their product can be,
they might be pleasantly surprised to
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appeal to them because of their reliance on a cultural capital that prizes
knowledge/information over pleasure/
fantasy/escape, pitting highbrow learning against lowbrow entertainment.
Intellectually challenging devices
such as voice-of-god narration, talking-head interviews and expert testimony are techniques designed to inform and challenge an audience. Such
attempts to encourage active viewing
not only deny an audience the same
pleasure that comes from viewing a
narrative fiction film, but are also often perceived as preaching or talking
down to the average audience, setting
up, however unintentionally, an usversus-them dichotomy. As Ouellette
describes, the prevailing attitude seems
to be that if docs, “suddenly appealed
to the masses, their purpose would be
defeated.” Of course, this attitude
only keeps docs locked in their
own constituency.
Video activist Kalin returns to this
unfortunate logic, “Probably the best
thing to do is face facts and scrap the
idea of reaching a mass audience,” he
says. “Work with what you have. Use
these videos as an organizing tool, use
them to reach other potential activists.
Think about who [they’re] going to
reach.” While this is great for reaching
other activists, are they the only people
worth reaching? Some activists may
argue their films work in conjunction
with grassroots activist movements
to change the system in a slow and
gradual way through the elevation of
the collective consciousness. They argue that docs are part of a network of
activism that includes political blogs,
online communities and other forms
of protest and advocacy. However, as
with the movies themselves, the people
utilizing larger forms of democratic
media are the converts.
If docmakers continue to “gear their
films toward their own constituency,”
as docmaker and author Pat Aufderheide says, then they can be assured that
that is the only constituency for which
they will hold any appeal. Say what
you will about Moore’s working-man
persona and posturing, at least he attempts to connect to people. His use of
music and montage invites the viewer
to pleasure rather than to alienation
through highbrow epistephilia. His
onscreen appearances and voice-over
narration differentiate his commentary
from that of a high and distant expert,
thus aligning himself with his audience.
Jeff Dibbs, producer of Fahrenheit
9/11 and Bowling for Columbine, acknowledges the importance of appealing to the senses rather than reason.
“Information cannot change behaviour,” he says. “No matter how many
times you tell people that smoking can
kill them, or to use a condom, they
won’t change their behaviour based
simply on knowing these facts.” Ultimately, Dibbs believes the experience
of watching a film is more important
than the information one gets out of it.
The big screen, the darkened theatre,
the musical score, all these elements
combine to create a visceral experience
that, he says, “takes you to a different
place and opens up a different channel
in the brain.” Whether an advocacy doc
is a big-budget docbuster or a smaller
budget production, it is important, according to Dibbs, that it get out there
and be seen under the proper conditions, that is, in a cinema and by a large
number of people. The aim, he says, is
not necessarily to convert people to
your way of thinking, but rather to get
them thinking and discussing: “It’s not
we’re right, you’re wrong,” he says, “it’s
getting people talking.”
Dibbs makes a valuable point: the
intention of advocacy docs should not
be to create social change through altering people’s minds about issues, but
rather through perpetuating constructive discourse. To do so, they need to
be appealing enough that people will
want to watch them in the first place,
and they need to be distributed effectively so that audiences will have
access to them. If the doc remains
marginal, cloistered, and aimed at its
own constituency, then not only will
it never be effective as a tool of social
change, but it will actively contribute
to its own demise.
Advocacy documentarians face a
difficult choice: they can remain underground and reach a small audience,
effecting little change, essentially undermining their raison d’être, or they
can attempt to court a mainstream
audience. On this route, they need to
rethink their strategies while seeking
larger distribution networks. While
they may never convert hard-core
conservatives, they can perhaps reach
audiences who have simply never had
alternatives offered to them before. If
docmakers can reach people who believe that Fox News tells the truth and
gently remind them otherwise, through,
say, a screening of Control Room, a
small shift in perception among such
folks could have great consequences
down the road.
In the end, the goal is to create films
that present alternatives and that challenge conventions in the hopes that
they will ultimately allow for independent, informed decision-making. It
may be unrealistic to expect a movie
to change the world, but how will we
know if we don’t even try?
The Five Best Advocacy Docs
You've Never Seen
The River (1938)
Forward thinking environmentalist and advocate Pare Lorentz
depicts the flooding of the Mississippi River, insisting on the
need for conservation measures and better use of natural
resources. Lorentz's film marries stunning visual imagery with
socially conscious commentary. At more than 65 years old,
it is among the first — and most compelling — environmental
advocacy docs.
Harvest of Shame (1960)
In this landmark doc that CBS aired on Thanksgiving day
1960, newscaster Edward R. Murrow highlights the plight of
migrant farm workers in America. The film focuses on harsh
living conditions, endless travel, low wages and poor opportunities for children of migrants. In declaring that hunger and
poverty existed in the land of plenty, the film was a watershed, ultimately contributing to the establishment of the Food
Stamp Program.
The Year of The Woman (1973)
This doc follows a band of renegade feminists as they run
amok at the Democratic National Convention in Florida.
Director Sandra Hochman engages in Michael Moore-style
ambushes, coaxing prominent men to share their absurd and
archaic views on women and the feminist movement, showing
early on that humour is a potent tool in docs.
Antonia: Portrait of the Woman (1974)
Jill Godmilow's deceptively simple film about the difficulties
a female symphony conductor encounters trying to get a job
in a harshly masculine environment still resonates powerfully.
Beyond being a beautifully crafted film, it is also one of the
landmark docs of the woman's movement.
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (2004)
This PBS doc from filmmaker Keith Beauchamp examines
the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from
Chicago beaten to death while visiting Mississippi. It looks at
the broad impact of his death, and the subsequent trial and
acquittal of his accused killers. An important film about civil
rights in America, it also uncovered information that led the
Justice Department to reopen the case in May 2004.
– Andrea Janes
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Going It Alone
Would the war in Iraq have been any more
successful with UN approval? By Dean Foster
A
fter nearly two years of steady deterioration
in Iraq, commentators in the media remain busy
churning out lessons that the Bush administration has learned, or, at least, should be learning
from what is likely to be a strategic disaster. Chief
among these lessons is that the failures in Iraq
have proven the futility of unilateral military adventurism, and thus, the strengths of multilateral
action. Philip Stephens recently asserted in his
Financial Times column that “the slide towards
civil war in Iraq offers the most convincing rebuttal of Mr. Bush’s reckless assertion that American
power has no need of the legitimacy that flows
from an international system grounded in the
rule of law.”
However, in drawing conclusions from the
problems of the Iraq occupation regarding the
superiority of multilateralism, commentators
are playing a game of analytical leapfrog. Quite
simply, we can only speculate how the war would
have played out if the U.S. had garnered full
UN support with assistance from a wider group
of countries. With this in mind, a number of
points made by critics of unilateralism should
be put to scrutiny.
The argument that America’s foregoing of UN
Security Council approval doused the invasion in
illegitimacy, and helped trigger a vicious resistance, needs a second look. After all, the veto-possessing Security Council members are not exactly
starlets in much of the Islamic world. Russia’s
long, brutal history with Chechnya, China’s poor
record regarding religious freedom for Muslims
in its western provinces, and, of course, France’s
recent and politically foolish headscarf ban would
have provided ample fuel for Islamic opposition
to such a multilateral occupation. There is no evidence to support the notion that an occupation
fully backed by the Security Council would have
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been accepted as more legitimate by members of
the current insurgency or the Iraqi population as
a whole. Indeed, the brutal bombing of the UN’s
Baghdad headquarters in August 2003 displayed
just how little legitimacy the organization possesses in the eyes of the insurgents.
The claim that Iraq provides evidence that
an international code for military intervention
is necessary overlooks an important detail: the
invasion was never a humanitarian mission.
The original reasoning given by Bush and Blair
was that Saddam’s regime posed an immediate,
credible threat to the world and therefore a preemptive invasion was of grave urgency. Now, a
more widely accepted version is that the Bush
administration put into action a decade-old plan
of neo-conservatives in the American defense
establishment to dispose of Saddam and use Iraq
as a Trojan horse for spreading democracy and
stabilizing the crucially important oil– and terrorism-producing Middle East. An international
code of intervention, worthwhile as it may be
for mitigating or preventing catastrophes like the
1994 Rwanda genocide or the current situation
in the Darfur region of Sudan, would have been
inapplicable to the early arguments of the Bush
and Blair administrations, which consisted of an
urgent call for pre-emptive defense.
A similar argument stands against those who
say that the situation could have been resolved
peacefully if the U.S. would have given weapons inspectors more time, as other veto-carrying
Security Council members insisted before the
war was launched. It is now (and for many, was
then) clear that every extra day that the inspectors toiled fruitlessly in Iraq sapped the inevitable
invasion of its already low stock of international
legitimacy. Again, this war was not just about
disarming Saddam Hussein. It was, as the Bush
Michael Kohl
administration made clear, about regime change.
One of the most obvious lessons of the Iraq
debacle is the difficulty of occupying a country
when you are seen as a self-interested imperial
power, especially in a region so conducive to
militant anti-Americanism. It is clear that the
vicious insurgency faced by coalition troops is
neither a force of evil that “hates freedom,” as
Bush officials like to explain, nor an anti-imperialist resistance unified by a common ideology, as
many anti-war activists romanticize. Rather, the
insurgency is composed of numerous fragmented
groups operating in a post-dictatorship power
vacuum and which happen to share a primary
goal at the moment: ridding Iraq of occupying
forces and secular, Western-supported government. If successful in this primary goal, they
may well turn their efforts on each other. Thus,
among Iraq’s most likely post-occupation
outcomes are civil war, some sort of Islamic
dictatorship, or both.
Even if the U.S. had been directly attacked
by Saddam’s regime and garnered the formal
backing of the entire UN General Assembly, thus
making the invasion completely legitimate un-
der international law, we would probably see a
similar situation in Iraq today. The combination
of a post-Saddam power vacuum, an abundance
of low-cost but effective weaponry, a region of
simmering militant Islam with lax border controls and America’s stigma as an imperialist
occupying force would have been a mixture
too explosive for the benefits of multilateral
legitimacy to overcome.
The last line of defense against the complete
collapse of peace and order in Iraq is the newly
elected government, widely expected at press
time to be a coalition of Shia and Kurds. If the
new government is able to broker an agreement
of cooperation and autonomy with the Sunnis
and the increasingly secessionist Kurds in the
north, gradually send the coalition troops home,
and show the population real improvements in
day-to-day life, the doomsday scenarios may be
averted with a slow and uneven drift to stability. If a sense of political legitimacy and order
comes to Iraq, it will be of a homegrown variety,
a feat that neither the U.S.-led coalition, nor a
UN-supported force could have achieved while
occupying the country.
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Adrian Milankov
Much Love
We often say that love knows
no bounds. Do we mean it?
Isaac Stein on the allure of
polygamy
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C
ritics of gay marriage often argue that the removal of hardened politician, the toughest stock trader, the most cynithe gender barrier in marriage could likewise lead to cal student magazine editor, if pressed, would surely admit
the dissolution of its numeric restriction. If matrimo- that they want to be remembered as much for the love they
nial rights cannot be denied to any two sweethearts regard- gave as for their material accomplishments.
less of gender, they argue, what will stop three, four or five
Humans can survive on love and precious little else; all is
loving souls from claiming those same rights as well?
vanity without love. Jon Bon Jovi, possibly an even greater
I, for one, am delighted by these arguments, though likely musical luminary than that other John, put it succinctly
not for the reasons hoped for by those who present them. I on his timeless album Slippery When Wet. While Richie
rejoice because, at long last, polygamy has become a matter Sambora's caterwauling guitar shrieks in the background,
of serious public debate! I am ahead of the curve, a beacon Jon intones, “There's nothing without love."
of progressivism, for I have been thinking about the benefits
The core problem with monogamy is that instead of enof polygamy for some time now.
couraging the idea of “love people a lot" or even “love one
Only thinking, though. As yet, I have not been willing to person a lot," it demands a negative policy of “love one
put my theories into practice, perhaps because I am afraid person above all others." So if you write a couple of stanzas
of the attending inconveniences. Polygamy requires pre- for friends or take them out for some nice dinners, your soul
cise management, and I am far too scatterbrained to ensure mate, according to orthodox monogamy, will justifiably feel
I wouldn't enter wife five’s name into the computerized inadequate or jealous. Monogamy seems to actively discourscore sheet while bowling with
age sharing the love with those we
wife three.
care about.
Is the driving reason for
Seriously speaking, the principle
Thankfully, there is greater latitude
reason for my chastity has been
when
dealing with friends than
our monogamous lifestyle
a long standing relationship with
there is with lovers. Nobody would
simple sexual jealousy? Sex
one girl. Love with one person, I
dispute that friends can make other
discovered, can demand a lot of
close connections without comprois definitely great, but it’s no
attention. Polygamous thoughts
mising existing friendships. In fact,
justification for limiting the
faded far into the background.
most people consider it unfitting to
That relationship, however, is
stick with just two or three friends
quantity of love in our lives
now over. She got away, leaving
your whole life. The diversity of
me with nothing but a bachelor
the human character renders it
apartment, a block of cheese smeared with jam, and rock inevitable that different people enrich an individual's life
n’ roll breakup albums galore, from Bob Dylan’s Blonde on in different ways. Having a variety of friends is not
Blonde to Beck’s Sea Change. But I must move on, and, an indication that some of these friendships must be
actually, I should feel liberated by this split. I finally shallow. After all, a healthy person has almost boundhave my chance to pack up for Utah and take a chance less love to give.
on love — four or five times over.
What accounts for the change when it comes to romantic
Polygamy! I can hear you cry. No wonder his relationship relationships? Is it all about sex? Is the driving reason for
failed. Check your incredulity for a moment; I have a point. our monogamous lifestyle simple sexual jealousy? Sex is
At the end of Abbey Road, John Lennon correctly reminds definitely great (I remember it well, and I'm almost sure
us, “And in the end…The love you take…Is equal to the love it's better than jam and cheese), but it's no justification for
you make." Humans have a powerful and redeeming capac- limiting the quantity of love you give and receive throughity for love, but monogamy encourages us to channel all our out your life. As good as sex is, it remains an ephemeral
love toward only one person. I loved buying my girlfriend pleasure. It’s not even in the same category as love, which is
presents, writing her poems and taking her out for dinner. It the part of our lives that stays vital the longest.
made her feel good, and it made me feel good to make her so
I strongly suspect that monogamy is just as capable of
happy. Small gestures of love, as Hallmark tells us, really do narrowing or even choking love as it is of enhancing it. But
go a long way. So why don't I buy gifts for my best friends, for all my arguments, I admit to a feeling that there is somepeople whom I have loved and cherished for a decade or thing essential about directing love to a single other. I can't
more? Why do I only demonstrate love for one person when provide a fuller explanation of that something, but, in my
I love so many?
last relationship, I think I experienced it. All of which leads
Love, most would agree, is probably the best thing we've me to speculate that maybe the real reason that I haven't
got. It's the life-sustaining emotion that human beings yet lit out for Mormon country is that I'm waiting for her to
around the world aspire to give and receive. Even the most take me back.
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Jamie Campbell
Speaking with Tongues
By Clif Mark
C
ANADIANS SEEM TO BE
CANADIAN merely out of habit,
or by some fluke of circumstance. In fact, there is a
goodly number of Canadians who, when asked, still claim
the nationality of their immigrant parents or grandparents.
The French on the other hand, have always been concerned
with being as French as they can manage.
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The popularity of such slogans as “France for the French"
shows us that this national obsession/political program has
not lost any of its strength in the face of globalization and
European integration. But if the Gauls and their nation as a
whole are parochial, their capital Paris is as cosmopolitan as
they come; the number of young foreigners who flock here
every year to work, study or bum around is astounding.
While the visitors do not segregate themselves from the
French, they inevitably spend much of their time rubbing
elbows with other internationals. Given that there is no
authoritative common language, socialization between internationals results in a wine-soaked linguistic anarchy that
provides ample opportunities for friendship, flirtation and
getting busy.
I have been studying in Paris for six months now, and I
can report that foreigners have been seizing these oppor-
Shame! The skeptics will cry. If you can’t speak, you can’t
have a meaningful relationship. The universal language of
love is nothing more than the magnetism of compatible
genitalia. What about the meeting of kindred spirits?
What about love poems? What about wit, intelligence or
decent dinner conversation? What about drunkenly calling your ex at four in the morning to slur your soul into
the receiver? Have not the authorities of daytime talk and
self-help taught us that communication is the key to a
successful relationship?
Daytime talk, as usual, is right; communication is the key
to a successful relationship. But that’s not to say that more
is always better. Instead, what is needed for love to bloom is
the right kind of communication. No relationship was ever
saved by communicating “my ex could go all night” or “that
lipstick reminds me of the first prostitute I banged.” Ulol is
Relationships end not because lovers couldn’t get to know each other
well enough, but because they got to know each other too well
tunities with happy abandon, coupling with each other at
a rate comparable to hamsters on Spanish fly. That young,
unattached (and, discouragingly often, attached), travellers should speedily find their way into each other’s arms,
beds and hearts is not surprising. Curiously though, most
seem to exclude their fellow nationals and co-linguists
from the realm of romantic possibility. In fact, couplings
between those who barely share a language are by far
the most prevalent kind. The love-shack of Paris is also a
tower of Babel.
I recently had dinner with one such international couple.
Paul is a fellow Canadian, and Mariko is Japanese. By all
indications they are very happy together. My conversation
with my countryman’s new girlfriend was necessarily terse.
“So, how are you enjoying Paris?" Mariko smiles and nods
enthusiastically. I continue, “What are you studying?"
“Yes," she answers, smiling widely and nodding enthusiastically. Later I ask her if she and Paul want to join me at
a party. Her face clouds over slightly. She then turns and
stares inquisitively at Paul. He repeats, adding explanatory
gestures, “do…you…want…to…go…to…party?" After listening with intense concentration, she shifts back towards me.
Beaming, she nods her approval.
My first impression was one of incredulity and pity. How
could they get together, much less stay together, when they
can hardly speak to each other? But of course I was forgetting about that inexhaustible resource that cross-linguistic
lovers turn to when faced with a communication barrier: the
universal language of love.
Ulol is the language of choice among young international
lovers. It has the power to bring together individuals, no matter how gaping the cultural or linguistic gulf between them.
It addresses what we have in common, and haughtily sweeps
aside differences that would bring any normal conversation
to a halt. The great advantage of Ulol is that everyone, excepting some very unfortunate individuals, speaks it.
specifically designed not only to let you say all the things
that keep lovers loving, but also to keep you and your partner
from saying all the dumb things that might spoil the mood.
Those who are unconvinced that any relationship can
survive in the long term without substantive communication will be comforted by the second principle of international romance, which runs “the best way to learn a
language is to fuck it." For better or for worse, if you
spend enough time with someone you're bound to figure
out how to speak to them, which caps the length of any
strictly Ulol relationship. Incidentally it also spawns another common phenomenon, which merits separate treatment: love as pedagogical strategy.
Whether intentional or not, as communication progresses
between cross-lingual lovers, they increasingly find themselves in the purview of conventional relationships where
the danger is no longer not enough communication, but too
much communication. Indeed, relationships end not because
the lovers couldn’t get to know each other well enough, but
because they got to know each other too well. That being
said, it is probably true that some relationships, especially
the long-term variety, depend on a fairly substantive capacity for communication.
So no matter what the case, the limited lifespan of Ulol
relationships is just another good reason to pursue them.
Where fluent communication might be crucial to a relationship (i.e. in the long term), it is bound to develop. In the cases
where it isn't necessary, and might even be harmful (i.e. the
period for which most foreigners will actually stay abroad),
fluent communication won’t develop adequately to hinder
other, non-lingustic pleasures. So as the young international
crowd here in Paris shows us, when the person you are hitting on says “no speak English/French/Esperanto" it should
not be interpreted as “don't talk to me," but rather as, “Sure,
I would love a drink. Why don't we get to know each other a
little better?"
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D I S PATC H
F RO M
A B ROA D
Finding Iran
With an eccentric nuclear inspector
as his guide, Richard Norman gets an
inside look at the hopes and fears of a
nation on the brink
WHEN I
WAS VISITING
TABRIZ, Iran, last year, I was ap- move forward with the program for civilian energy pur-
proached by a young man in an Internet café. He attempted
small talk in broken English. Sensing my disinterest, he produced credentials. “I am British citizen,” he told me. “I have
apartments in London and Vienna. I am here now in Tabriz
for vacation. Then, maybe three weeks I go back to Vienna.”
He told me he spoke seven languages and that he worked
for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he then
confirmed by showing me his IAEA identification card.
We talked for a little while. When I told him I had to leave,
he asked if he could meet me the next morning at my hotel.
He said, “I am a very famous man in Tabriz. Many people
know and love me. They can meet with you.”
The next morning I came down to the lobby and found
Zavar chatting with the hotel owner. They seemed to know
each other. “My friend, Richard — how are you this morning? You are happy, you are frisky? Let us go, there are
many people you must meet with me.”
It was a hot day. The streets were jammed with dozens
of identical Paykan automobiles. Russian motorcycles and
mopeds weaved through the traffic. Exhaust fumes and
honking filled the air. The Iranian interior ministry had just
released an estimate of the number of citizens killed or injured in traffic accidents: 200,000 in 2003 alone.
“The people in Iran are not happy people,” Zavar said.
“They are angry. The mullahs make life very poor. They are
sad people.” It seemed true. Men limped, women walked as
if in a trance.
IT
WAS JUNE OF 2004. Eighteen months earlier, Iranian
President Mohammad Khatami had announced that Iran
possessed a uranium enrichment program and planned to
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poses. A few months later, a report published by the IAEA,
an autonomous body that safeguards against the misuse of
nuclear energy, indicated that the Iranian government had
misled the international community on the nature of a number of aspects of this enrichment program — for starters, the
program had been secretly ongoing for more than a decade.
Furthermore, many of the largest facilities were constructed
underground as if in anticipation of attack. A number of
high profile showdowns between the Iranian government
and the IAEA followed. For many, the official line from Tehran didn’t wash; the only important question involved how
close Iran was to developing nuclear weapons.
That month, the European powers — the UK, France and
Germany — released a draft of a UN resolution deploring
Iranian dissimulation. The IAEA too was threatening to refer
Iran to the Security Council for sanctioning. The Iranians
had responded by claiming the IAEA had overlooked a
small, unofficial admission that they considered evidence of
their compliance.
Iranian hardliners had won contested elections six months
earlier. The mullahs were testing their strength and testing
the international community’s patience, both with great
success. They held all the cards. With American forces tied
down in Iraq, neither the United States nor Israel was keen
on a confrontation. The IAEA had raised its voice on several
occasions, and the international community was threatening to get serious.
As we walked around Tabriz, Zavar assured me that his
boss, Mohammed ElBaredei, director general of the IAEA,
was on top of things. “Soon, the government in Iran will be
no more,” Zavar promised. “Mohammed and George Bush
will come and destroy the mullahs.”
Samar Mondapour
A professor at Tehran University made a
speech saying that Muslims are not “monkeys”
and “should not blindly follow” clerics. In November
2002, he was sentenced to death
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33
“DO
The city of Qom, two hundred kilometres south of Tehran, is the
mullahs’ powerbase. The river Qom, shown here, has dried out and
been paved and turned into a parking lot
YOU HAVE MANY GIRLFRIENDS in Canada?” Zavar asked me,
brightening, as we waited to cross a busy street. “In Iran I have
many girlfriends. In Tabriz I have” — he began counting on his
fingers — “maybe, 40 girlfriends. Maybe 60. In Tehran, I have 70.
Esfahan, they are not good-looking but I have 50. And Shiraz,
Richard, the girls you cannot believe them. There I have maybe 80
or 90 girlfriends.”
That afternoon, Zavar and I walked through Tabriz’s ancient
bazaar. We entered a sunlit courtyard. A small, white-haired man
with a round face greeted us. He was grinning and shook my hand
with great pleasure. “He says he is very pleased to meet you,” Zavar
told me. “You see I am a famous man here. And so you now are
famous too.” We sat down in the shop and Zavar translated for me.
Mr. Zahiri had fought in the Iran-Iraq war. When he spoke about
his experiences, his enormous eyes filled with tears. “How old do
you think he is?” Zavar asked me when Mr. Zahiri left the room. He
looked to be in his mid-60s. “He is a funny man,” said Zavar. “He
is 48.”
Mr. Zahiri produced a small gas range and began to boil a pot of
water. Zavar smiled. “We will have lunch now, Richard. Do you like
to eat mind?”
“Mind?”
“Yes, the mind of a cow. Will you eat it?”
IRAN
One of several murals the Iranian government has commissioned
to be painted on the perimeter walls of the former American
embassy in Tehran (now known to Iranians as the “U.S. Den of
Esponiage”)
IS A THEOCRACY. Its government is controlled by Islamic clerics. As such, the state is no more answerable than a god. Indeed, to
speak against the government is to be guilty of apostasy, which can
carry a sentence of death. In 2002, Hashem Aghajari, a professor
at the teacher’s college at Tehran University and a veteran of the
Iran-Iraq war, made a speech to a group of students in which he
said that Muslims were not “monkeys” and “should not blindly follow” clerics. He was sentenced to death. After popular protests, his
conviction was overturned. Then, following February’s elections, his
death sentence was reimposed. As Canadians saw recently with the
case of Montreal journalist Zahra Kazemi, justice in Iran is often a
theopolitical football.
The social and religious controls imposed on the people of Iran
by the government are many. Perhaps most dangerous — considering the nation’s nuclear ambitions — is the sponsorship of national
victimhood. The historical crimes committed against Iran are, like
the heroism of its martyrs, often evoked on street corners. The walls
surrounding the former American embassy in Tehran are festooned
with murals: a Statue of Liberty with a skull-face; a star-spangled
gun pointing at a defenceless woman and child.
A billboard outside a government office in downtown Tehran
shows a photograph of dead Iranian children with an English caption that reads, “Never forget the nations, Germany and France, who
sold gas to our enemy [Iraq] that was used to kill our children.” In
Esfahan, outside of the Imam Khomeini Mosque, are stenciled on
dozens of perimeter stones, “Down with Israel; Down with America.”
The Iranian government spends millions of dollars on propaganda
and has incorporated it into their debased Islam.
THE
Imam Khomenei Square in Esfahan
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WEEK AFTER I MET ZAVAR, I travelled alone to the central city
of Esfahan; there Zavar called my hotel. “Richard, my dear friend, I
will be in Esfahan later this day. I will meet with my girlfriend and
introduce you. She is my heart, my life! And to tell you the truth,
Richard, I am wanting her to be my wife. My friend, reserve
to me a room in your hotel.”
The next day we went down to the river, the Zayandeh
Rud, to meet Lida, Zavar’s friend. Lida was a high school
history teacher and was joined by one of her former students, a girl named Mahasti. The four of us waded across the
shallow river under an ancient bridge. Each time we passed
a poster of Ayatollah Khamenei, Zavar would shake his head
and comment. “He is a very bad man. We say that he is
two-legged donkey. A very stupid man." Lida and Mahasti
looked around nervously, and after a few similar comments,
Lida became angry. She spoke quickly, scolding Zavar. He
grinned. “She says she does not like the Iran government,
but that Bush and Blair are much worse. I am asking in
which country she would be preferring to live. I am inviting
her to London with me and she is saying yes, Zavar, you are
a wonderful, famous man, yes, you must let me come with
you.” He laughed and drew Lida close to him, kissing her on
the cheek. She looked angry but she let him.
We hailed a taxi and drove up into the mountains. “This
is where Lida lives,” Zavar told me. “Her husband is here.
He is a good man. He is a doctor. And her two babies live
here too.” I told him I was surprised to learn his girlfriend
was married with two children and that we were now taking
a taxi to their house. He threw his hands into the air to
acknowledge the absurdity. “This is me," he laughed.
Lida's town was called Shahr-e Kord. The air was clean,
there were trees and the clerics had little sway. We got out of
the taxi and went up the stairs of a limestone townhouse.
Upon entering, Lida and Mahasti took off their headscarves
and jilbabs (long coats). Mahasti went into the kitchen and
returned to the living room with a warm can of Bavaria
beer, eight percent alcohol. “You are the guest, Richard. Here
is something for you.” The beer had likely been smuggled
in from Germany or Turkey. They were pleased to offer it to
me. They sat down and watched me drink it from a small
aperitif glass that one of Lida’s daughters had provided.
The news was on the television and Zavar hushed us. The
top story was the current dispute between the government
and the IAEA. A clip was shown of a crowd of men and
women in a conference room in Vienna.
“This is my boss, Mohammed,” Zavar told us, as ElBaredei
was briefly shown. “He is an Arab and a Muslim, but he is
a good man.” (Earlier, Zavar had told me the only religious
people he liked were Jews. “I have two Jewish girlfriends,”
he’d said proudly.)
Zavar translated the newscast for me, “Khemanei has said
that America wants Iran to be weak. But if it is God’s will
that Iran will be powerful, not even America can stop this.”
THE IRANIANS HAVE A POWERFUL HAND in the region surrounding them. As sponsors of Hamas and Hezballoh, and
certain Shiite factions in American-occupied Iraq, their
political reach greatly affects Israeli and American policy.
Twenty-five years ago, Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran, hoping to capitalize on his neighbour’s lack of
stability following its Islamic Revolution. A nuclear Iran,
next door to a highly unstable Iraq on one side, and a highly
unstable Afghanistan on the other, and a rival nuclear
power, Pakistan, on a third border, has a powerful potential
to reverse the equation. A bomb inscribed with the name of
god is a dangerous thing.
LIDA’S HUSBAND, THE DOCTOR, came home, closing the door
quietly behind him. He looked weary but he was pleased to
see us. He shook our hands and his face brightened. His
youngest daughter sat on his lap, and he asked me some
friendly questions using Zavar as a translator. We ate dinner,
sitting on the carpet, with the food on dishes on a protective
plastic sheet.
I slept that night in a spare bedroom in the basement. The
next morning, I woke up late and found no one else in the
house. I was sitting in the living room when the doctor came
home from work for lunch. He greeted me, and entered his
bedroom to change. Moments later, Zavar exited the same
bedroom. He looked pale. He whispered, “Richard, this is
very bad,” said Zavar. “We are guests in his house. He saw
Lida and me together. We should leave.”
I asked Zavar if we should pack up. “First, I must apologize
to the doctor,” he said. Zavar entered the bedroom. After a
few minutes, Zavar exited the bedroom smiling. The doctor
followed him out.
“The doctor,” said Zavar, “is a very good man. He is very
kind. We can stay. We are his guests.”
The next day it was time for me to leave. Zavar accompanied me back to Tehran as he had business at the embassy.
At three o’clock that morning, when the bus made a routine
stop at a roadside mosque, I asked him why the doctor had
forgiven him so easily.
Zavar looked serious. “It is not a good marriage for them.
The doctor is a sick man. He was a soldier in the war. Now
he has what in English is hepatitis. This is very popular in
Iran. So he forgives me because his wife is not happy and
she likes me.”
After a long night on the bus, we arrived in Urmia, my
last stop before taking a cab to the Turkish border. Zavar
and I approached the taxi stand, and we looked up at the
large mural above the entrance. Side by side were portraits
of Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei. Khomeini,
founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, stared suspiciously
to the left, his black eyebrows arched and assured. Khamenei,
the second and current leader of Iran, wore thick glasses. A
self-satisfied smile sat on his lips.
Zavar looked up at the portraits. “Ayatollah Seyyed Ali
Khamenei,” he said slowly, emphasizing his disgust. “This
is the funny thing: he has no penis. He is on this poster,
he is the big boss. But he has no penis. No hand and no
penis.” Khamenei's right hand had been severely wounded
in a 1981 assassination attempt.
Zavar shook my hand. He said, “No one here is happy
because the mullahs are very bad. The people have lost their
heart. They are not frisky.” There were dark circles under
his eyes. “But Mohammed and George Bush will save them.
Then, I think, they will be happy again.”
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Woman^and^Writer
Fiction^by^Michael^Davidson^^
Illustrations^by^Michael^Kohl
T
he cursor is moving along the screen, a solid wall spitting
letters from its mouth. I put my hand on Mr. Pipe’s head
and the cursor becomes constipated, and it stays still, and
it blinks. Mr. Pipe, I say. I say, here you are spinning yet
another story about yourself, always about yourself, but if it
sells, hey, you might as well keep at it. Five books already to
your credit, each of them international hits, including your
latest, Sunset Cliffs, a big market in Germany for this last
one. I guess the world wants to read about you. Of course
it’s a fictionalized version, a you that’s not altogether you,
better at times, more romantic, and, then again, often worse,
in fact, quite pitiable, more doomed than any situation I’ve
ever put you in, a man so tragic he could only be a writer.
You hear me Mr. Pipe, you’d expire from boredom if I didn’t
let you write, able to support yourself on silly, meaningless
words, not a hint of honest work on your hands, no saltbleached stains on your shirt, no wrinkles on your forehead,
a relatively easy go you’ve had. You’ve been privileged and,
at least now — because it wasn’t always this way, I’ll have
you know — utterly ungrateful for all I’ve given, and that,
Mr. Pipe, is why I’m here, to deal with the ingrate in you, to
make him learn to be considerate.
I take my hand off Mr. Pipe’s head. He grins and the cursor
solidifies into a spray of letters, leaving them behind with
others till words are discernible, and the words run, don’t
they, with an ease comparable to your life. What exactly do
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you do, Mr. Pipe, other than start the day after eight hours
of sleep, shower, breakfast, read novels, and then write, go
about your story-making as if it were a real job, stopping
at times to look at the field in front of your apartment, to
gawk at dogs and masters frolicking, and in the evening
treat yourself to dinner out before you read more novels and
turn over in bed, extinguish the light and call the day over,
tell me, is this the extent of what you do? Here, because
his writing distracts him, I put my hand on his head and
the cursor obeys, stops mid-sentence. People have to work,
I say. I say, there are many people in this world, a herd of
them, who begin their day at sunrise to an annoying sound,
and variants of it continue throughout the day, coalescing
into a terrible scratch till they get home, but even their own
roofs can’t shelter them, and you, Mr. Pipe, you will have
none of that, you’ll have nothing but insulated silence.
My hand slips, compelled by a force altogether foreign,
and the cursor escapes for five letters before I discontinue
his inspiration. The letters scan Gogol. Although I’ve more
to say, the writer’s name invokes the past, the great moments we shared riding the britzka contriving methods to
collect dead souls — our discourse along Russia’s carriage
trails was exemplary — and I’ve no choice but to digress,
send my love to Nikolai Gogol. Now there was a writer, I say.
I say, there was an author who didn’t have it easy from the
start, he left home for St. Petersburg, writing short stories
and plays and then, his tour de force, the two-volume novel
that, alas, set him to rest. He didn’t have the media hype that
accompanied your first work, the ads and reviews made a
success of an otherwise shabby story, you know that a better
writer is in you, and yet you disgraced me and the others
I’ve mused into greatness with your debut.
That, Mr. Pipe, brings me again to your lack of consideration, your lapse into being an ingrate, which has culminated
in this silly story you’re working on now, in particular with
this Bianca character, a spitting image of me. You make her
not just a reader of Ernest Pipe novels, but a fanatic. Is that
the respect I get after giving you innumerable ideas, after
guiding you along countless story lines? You’re still ruthless
enough to paint me the fanatic, too weak-minded to stand
on my own, unless, of course, you’re by my side to provide
support. Just read what you’ve written and ask yourself if I
merit this treatment. Do you think the beauty you give me
suffices? Do twilight hair and Betty Boop lips compensate
for the disreputable way I handle what could be my significant other, a boyfriend perhaps, or even my husband?
Going so far as to abandon him, make a cuckold of him,
for you, I simply stand and leave the Mexican restaurant to
start anew with the writer of Sunset Cliffs. Apparently my
life before meeting you was insignificant enough to ditch
without reflection. I can’t believe you, Mr. Pipe, have some
care for me, your muse who would love you if you gave
her recognition.
At this, I take my hand off his head because I’m going to
cry and I don’t want him to see me like this, if he can see
me. I repair into a room, slam the door. Go on writing your
slander, I say. I say, go ahead and finish, I can’t stop you. I
strain to listen, cupping my hand on the oak and pressing an
ear against it, however, I detect no sounds. Mr. Pipe, I say.
I say, Mr. Pipe, please, he says. He says, call me Ernie. But
you can hear me, you heard me all this time. Lilith, beloved
Lilith, I hear nothing but you.
How embarrassing, Mr. Pipe, Ernie, please, call me Ernie.
But I didn’t think you could hear me, honestly, I didn’t think
we were on the same plane. Gogol was the last writer who
ever heard me the way you hear another, that’s why we talked, that’s why we loved, but you’re distant, only receptive to
my suggestions when asleep. The doorknob turns despite my
resistance, and Ernie welcomes himself. You know, he says.
He says, ages have passed since I’ve stepped into this room,
it’s intended for guests, but this apartment hasn’t seen any
of those since you moved in. Why didn’t you acknowledge
me before, why today? Because I’m superstitious, I believe
talking with a muse, especially your muse, will result in
disaster. Here I laugh. My little writer is serious.
Then I recall Gogol, the way he refused to nourish himself, like some hunger artist, except it was religion that got
to the Russian, not the desire to set records and remain the
best circus act, and it certainly wasn’t me, or rather, his
acknowledgment of me. I’m still laughing when he says,
don’t do that. He says, I’ll get to the point, I’ve decided we
should talk because I want to apologize for the treatment
I’ve given you in previous stories, and, in particular, this
piece I’m working on now. It isn’t meant to belittle you
but for some inexplicable reason you feel it does, and for
that I apologize. Lilith, I’m sorry. Wait, stop right there,
don’t apologize just to humour me, don’t treat me like one
of your fanatic readers, you know I’m more than that and
still you insist on putting me in the same category as the
Biancas of the world, falling prostrate at your feet and calling you king.
If you’re going to apologize I want you to do it the only
way you can, Mr. Literate, not by filling this room with
treacherous words just to make me happy, to appease me
and move on with your day. No, Ernie, I expect you to write
me the way I’m meant to be written, make me unearthly,
make my name P. And what shall P. stand for? Stand for,
you think it has to be an initial? Of course, every lone letter
with a period stands for something. Then it’ll be short for
Patrick. Is that right, you want my middle name even though
its gender is clearly in conflict with yours? Just think of it as
my way of paying respect to your late mother, Patricia.
Here Ernie is disturbed. Any invocation of her makes his
nostrils quiver. I put my hand on his head and his eyes
become constipated, and they stay still, and they blink. I
release the writer and he begins to narrate a tremendous
thread of prose. It could’ve been mother behind the red light,
he says. He says, mother ruthlessly accusing me for being
her erroneous child, the black sheep of the Pipe family who
hoarded unreasonable sums of money and pampered himself
with a thickness of solitude that couldn’t, under any circumstances, be penetrated because he was the lone source of her
shame. And there was always Britt, whom she never failed
to mention, consistently citing her, despite stacked evidence
to the contrary, as the reason for my post-collegiate behavior. But Britt has nothing to do with my so-called hermitude,
she is, bluntly put, a girl whom I’ve consigned to the past.
I find it rather troublesome, if not completely intolerable,
that during all mother’s rants she has conveniently neglected
to credit her role in my current state, namely, discovering
me and Britt indecent over Christmas vacation and, instead
of leaving the room as quietly as she had entered, keeling
at the hips in order to better eject a most despicable vomit,
bits of her afternoon lunch smacking my thigh, my forearm.
When it appeared to be finished — me and Britt unable to react to the surprise of her being there, hovering over her son
and his girlfriend both naked and preoccupied with a basic
need — mother initiated another round, her face blanched,
her throat gaped and choked as a more vibrant display of
vomit boiled forth, her hand clutched around her neck, trying to remedy the situation, but serving no purpose except,
perhaps, to give impetus to her vomit, arching mid-air as
coarse bits touched down on Britt’s left nipple and cheek.
When all was said and done, mother forgot to apologize. She
simply cleared her throat, gave us an indeterminate casting
of the eye, and did what she should’ve done before
the vomit fell, that is to say, she left as
surreptitiously as she had entered.
And now she wonders why I’m a
hermit, why I’ve let the antisocial
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wave carry me to the shores of an unknown island, going
so far as to blame Britt for my current state. The expression
on her face, that is, my ex-girlfriend’s, after the incident,
embodied both religion and science, the mutually exclusive
spheres gelled into a single countenance, that of a twentyyear-old girl. I’m certain the watershed battle transpired on
the tip of her nose, that’s where priests and chemists toughed
it out with crosses and bombs, grail and godlessness, right
on her nose, which, as a side note, did good to her face in
that it didn’t draw attention to itself. What I said to her, to
my poor Britt, now consigned to the past, after the stench
of vomit surrounded us, was rather inappropriate. The situation called for sorry, or God, I’m terribly sorry, sweetheart, I
don’t know what got into that woman, she’s crazy, meaning
mother, of course. I should’ve hastened into the bathroom
and let the water run, cleaned Britt of mother’s vomit, muttered the limited set of pleasantries known to me by that age
and recited them nonstop. But I could only think of myself,
not so much the filth on my thigh and forearm as the reason
for mother’s reaction, or rather, its implications.
Why did she do that, I thought, and then, distractedly
turning to Britt under me, I said, I must be inexhaustibly
revolting, you know, to inspire such disgust in the pit of
mother’s stomach, my own mother. Britt was, needless to say,
speechless, so I pulled out and added, I’m the most revolting
person around, and I repeated this while Britt, being the
sweetheart she was, attempted as inconspicuously as possible to raise her hand and clean the vomit from her nipple
and cheek as I continued to recite, the most revolting person
around. But, as it is, mother chooses to ignore this event,
which, in the truest sense of the word, was shattering, world
shattering, the kind that leaves the glasswork irreparably
damaged, it is perhaps this instance alone that has made
me how I am, that is to say, has left me like a religious man
without desires.
Put mildly, I refuse to believe in the beauty of my eyes, I
refuse to believe I am beautiful. On the contrary, I compose
the whole of the unwanted, of the ugly, can it be any other
way, I thought. My own mother vomited at the sight of what
is considered the human body at its finest moment. Mother
was compelled to vomit, couldn’t restrain herself from vomiting, couldn’t spare me and my self-image because it was
just that natural to vomit.
Here I put my hand on Ernie’s head, let him recuperate before throwing the heavy gates open again. If I don’t
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2005
he’ll be inundated with words that mean too much, that
are too private, and they'll be like stones that bring him
to his knees, and to his death. Soon I ask myself whether
he has had enough break. I lift my hand. Why didn’t she
vomit when she found me masturbating for the first time,
or rather, conducting what happened to be my initial experiment in perversion, he says. He says, why didn’t she vomit
then? Me posed before television with hand in pants, body
awkward because I lacked the patience to lower them, her
opening door and, upon seeing me, halting with groceries.
She had the gall to ask what I was doing, like she didn’t
know, like mother was never a teenager without a libido
one day and raging hormones the next. I responded more
with my hand than voice, taking it out and turning it palm
up, as if stumped by my actions, in particular the pubic
hair jammed between my forefinger and my nail. Mother,
ruthless in every situation, remained unsatisfied with the
evidence against me. She hurried into the living room to
determine what program her son was watching.
She was too fast for me to react, to render the scene somewhat decent, in this way, we both watched woman atop man.
No gelling of religion and science in her face, just religion
at its most robust moment. Mother had nothing to say, I
took flight upstairs, she pursued, at the door to my room
she grabbed my wrist and, somehow aware that this was
my first time, said, you’re becoming a man, you’re almost
a man, why don’t you go downstairs and get it over with,
Ernie? No one will bother you, become a man tonight. The
tone in her delivery, I wanted to hit her very hard. Finish
becoming a man, inaugurate myself, my body, into manhood by masturbating, by feeling pathetic because no one
in their right mind would touch me the way I could touch
myself. Needless to say, my first orgasm wasn’t a gift given
by woman, by the natural giver of this gift, but rather by the
sterile tube of television in cahoots with my dreadful hand,
which will always be a witch-like extension of mother.
Here Ernie woozes, collapses into my breasts. I carry, or
rather, cradle him in my arms to the next room, where I
place him at his keyboard. There, there, I say. I say, now
tell us about P. It isn’t till late when he labours into bed.
I’m waiting. Hello, angel, he says. He says, we’ve done it,
after all these years. He kisses me and we’re getting intimate
when the phone sounds. It’s our daughter, a first-year in
college, telling us she’s bringing her new boyfriend home
for Thanksgiving.
>>> LITERARY
REVIEW
HARUKI MURAKAMI
> Every Man Is an Island
Japan’s most famous writer brings us deep into a
“place that is no place.” The place where love begins
PAGE
ONE OF HARUKI MURAKAMI'S Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
and already seduced by unknowns. An unemployed man is cooking
spaghetti and whistling along with Rossini at 10:30 in the morning. He’s interrupted by the phone. A mysterious woman demands
10 minutes of his time. That’s how long they'll need to understand
each other, she explains. Who’s the lady? We urgently want to
know. Less urgently, we are curious about what she might mean
by understanding.
Later, Toru Okada, the spaghetti cooker, is riding the Tokyo subway when he spots a man with a guitar case. Okada swears that he
saw the guitarist perform one night, years earlier, at a club in Hokkaido. The night is etched into his memory as one that portended
his wife’s recent baffling departure. Maybe the guitar player can
offer a clue?
The mysterious scenarios compel our attention, which Murakami’s
prose rarely allows to waver. His sentences are elegantly sparse and
honest. Critics have called his style “simple.” This, presumably, is
the polite way to say that he avoids the frivolous adornment preferred by some contemporaries. Murakami shows that the measure
of good prose is less about the complexity of words than it is about
how sentences move. Consider the following, a mini-paragraph
from the novel A Wild Sheep Chase: “A month had passed since I
agreed to the divorce and she moved out. A non-month. Unfocused
and unfelt, a lukewarm protoplasm of a month.”
Murakami masterfully manipulates the rhythm of these sentences. The long run, followed by a stark break brought off through
a sharp, arresting phrase. Then a new run that both unpacks the
relevance of the break and builds its own significance upon it. Jay
Rubin, one of Murakami's English language translators and the
author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, has said that
Murakami’s shifting rhythms can often mirror the movement of
hard bop jazz. To verify, read Murakami aloud, then listen to Art
Blakey. This is cool-sounding writing.
Thus we are whisked along in Murakami. Intriguing mysteries
artfully described through shifting beats. Somewhere along the
way, however, the questions that first propelled the story seem to
fade. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example, we never really
learn the identity of the woman on the phone. The guitar case man
turns out not to be a secret source of wisdom, but a lunatic wielding a baseball bat. Indeed, most of Murakami’s stories are filled
with carefully released questions that become trivial or disappear
just as enlightenment seems imminent.
Why does Murakami never finish his stories? Dance Dance Dance
provides a hilarious but poignant answer, as it follows an unnamed
protagonist’s search for his long lost girlfriend, Kiki, a call girl
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2005
with beautiful ears. Near the end of the novel, he finally learns
of her fate. Gotanda, a friend made along the way, admits that he
“probably” killed her.
Following this announcement, Kiki’s relevance to the story
dissolves. Gotanda’s confession does not anger the protagonist;
instead, he consoles Gotanda, easily forgiving him for the murder.
Kiki is forgotten. Gotanda takes her place. What could have made
Gotanda do it? They wonder together. Maybe his actions can help
them learn who Gotanda really is.
Here the protagonist’s true priorities are revealed. Kiki was never
more than an abstraction, provoking real feelings in the protagonist but only vague ideas as to why those feelings should remain
connected to her. Gotanda, however, is a genuine friend, and their
relationship provides the protagonist with a kind of fulfillment he
previously thought depended on Kiki.
Essentially, the mystery about Kiki gives way to a deeper and
more essential story. This is the story of a friendship. The protagonist senses that the friendship with Gotanda is what’s important to
protect. His urgent need is to understand his friend. Nevertheless,
he remains unsure about how much he or anyone can truly know
about anyone else.
MURAKAMI’S WORKSHOP is the point of reflection where one’s
needs and what one understands about them are assessed. Plot devices such as disappearing girlfriends and cats, untimely deaths, and
earthquakes are generally aimed at bringing this reflection about.
Yet there is a complication. The majority of Murakami’s characters
are hyper-reflective to begin with. This is especially true of one of
Murakami’s prevalent narrator types, an introspective male approaching the midpoint of life. Though attached to conventional
values and beliefs, this narrator is always a step removed from full
social engagement. He is usually an intellectual drifter, possessing a
clear understanding of the kind of life he wishes to avoid but only
vague conceptions of an alternative.
Though such aloofness might ultimately be salutary for genuine
self-reflection, it can also spell surrender to a cowardly conscience.
In fact, one begins to suspect that many of Murakami’s protagonists, had their hands not been forced, would stay the course,
half-heartedly living lives whose premises are neither validated
nor abandoned.
Self-reflection then, requires a radical break from everyday
life. That is why Toru Okada’s long stint at the bottom of a deep
well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle lingers as one of Murakami’s
most powerful images. Murakami brings us to a place of profound
solitude not easily escaped. But his goal is not to isolate us there
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permanently, a fate that few would be able to bear. Rather, he is
curious to see what we discover while in the well, and what kind
of lifelines we throw upward as a result.
God is not one of those lifelines. Aside from a few cameos,
religion and theology remain strikingly absent from the internal
monologues of Murakami’s characters. This may have something
to do with the fact that writer and his characters are Japanese.
If Toru Okada had been American, the chances are that at some
point while in the well he would mutter about God or feel some
rumblings of belief. An American character, and likely even a
European, would probably acknowledge, if only in rejection, the
various popular religious explanations.
Still, one wonders whether the experience of a secular American Toru would
ultimately be significantly different on
the count of theology.
Murakami’s
characters
similarly
neglect politics, and often mock them.
Toru Watanabe (Murakami favours the
name Toru, Japanese for “sea”), of Norwegian Wood seems almost bewildered
that there could be such a thing as political principle. On his late ’60s college
campus, he simply goes about his business, oblivious to the student radicals’
orchestrated disruptions of university
life. And in Dance Dance Dance, the
unnamed protagonist explains his
alienation from his contemporaries by
remarking that they “actually cared who
won elections.” The prospect of finding
internal roots for citizenship is never
seriously considered.
The absence of politics, however, does
not dispel the possibility that there is
something of a political framework at
work in Murakami’s writing. This is not
to say that Murakami has a deliberate
political purpose, something I find extremely unlikely. But the wide appeal of
Murakami’s characters to the young and secular in North America,
Europe and Japan — the lands of advanced capitalism — reveals that
the author has a knack, what ultimately must be considered a politically-informed knack, for addressing concerns we might be able to
feel and avoiding others which we might not even comprehend. In
short, Murakami’s immunity from religion and politics is our own.
Our solitude must be breached elsewhere.
IN AN INTERVIEW with the travel magazine Paper Sky, Murakami
describes the deep solitude at the core of his writing — but also the
possibilities contained therein: “It's beneath reality, like an under-
ground, really. And in our underground, there are long tunnels
stretching out in all directions, and if we seriously intend to do so,
and also if we are fortunate, you and I will be able to encounter
one another somewhere.”
Profound seclusion is too much to bear. When confronted with
it, man senses that there must be others. His longing tells him it
must be so. If he can find those others, he doesn’t have to abide the
solitude alone.
At the end of Norwegian Wood, Toru Watanabe calls out for Midori — a girl whose beautifully simple longings had previously been
obscured — “from the dead center of this place that was no place.”
Watanabe has similar longings to Midori,
but his longings had been frustrated by
drawn out tragedy. The call is an urgent
proclamation that Watanabe understands
his desires to be similar to Midori’s. He
needs and loves her. For him, there might
not be anything else to understand.
In the short story “Honey Pie,” protagonist Junpei makes a similarly firm
decision about love. An earthquake has
ripped through Kobe, a symbol of the
chaos at the heart of things. Love is
fragile, to him the only thing that is not
chaos. He says:
I want to write about people who
dream and wait for the night to
end, who long for the light so
that they can hold the ones they
love. But right now I have to stay
here and keep watch over this
woman and this girl. I will never
let anyone — not anyone — try to
put them into that crazy box, not
even if the sky should fall or the
earth crack open with a roar.
IN HIS MOMENT OF SOLITUDE, Junpei finds heroic responsibility in love.
Confronted with a great rupture, he
scrambles to fortify and protect his loved
ones. He concludes that such protection is an integral part of love.
In the end, one might call Murakami a partisan of friendship and
love. But what is crucial is the solitude, the darkness in the well. In
this solitude there begins an examination of the self, which always
seems to point toward others. Whether this solitude is the real origin
of understanding, friendship and love is an open question. What is
clear is that through recognition of solitude, love often burns brightest. Murakami shows us the way people of different needs carve
paths to others within themselves, along the way showing us much
about these needs. It is a portrait of love made in a vast darkness
with open eyes.
– Neil Rogachevsky
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H U N T E R S. T H O M P S O N
> The Life and Death of Gonzo Journalism
Hunter S. Thompson, the legendary counter-culturalist
who committed suicide in February at the age of 67,
will be remembered best for gonzo journalism, the
radical style of reporting that he created. His work put
him at the forefront of the journalistic revolution of
the '60s and '70s, and it stands today among the 20th
century's most inimitable approaches to writing.
John Filiatreau, a reporter from Thompson’s hometown newspaper,
the Louisville Courier-Journal, provides the best definition of gonzo
journalism: “Gonzo can only be defined as what Hunter Thompson
does. It generally consists of the fusion of reality and stark fantasy
in a way that amuses the author and outrages his audience. It is
point of view run wild.” Gonzo is a style of reporting that requires
little re-writing, is intensely subjective and unremittingly literary.
As University of Florida journalism professor William McKeen
notes, interview transcripts, pieces of other articles, verbatim phone
conversations and telegrams are all components of gonzo journalism. The essential ingredient, however, is that the writer become the
focus of the quest for information — the writer must be both behind
the scenes and in the scenes.
Hunter Stockton Thompson discovered his vocation as a journalist
in 1955, shortly after being released from the Jefferson County jail
in Louisville where at the age of 17, he spent 60 days on a bogus
robbery charge. Upon his release, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force.
Stationed in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Thompson lied about his
credentials and became sports editor of the base newspaper, the
Command Courier. After a few weeks of covering college football
games, Thompson realized he didn’t actually have to attend the
games to write about them. He could easily put together a story from
what he had seen on television and gathered from other sources. So
began his foray into unorthodox journalism.
More than a decade later, Thompson’s audacity led him to adopt an
entirely different style of reporting. Instead of distancing himself from
the stories he covered, he became part of them. In 1966, he earned
national attention with the publication of his book Hell’s Angels: A
Strange and Terrible Saga, an account of the months he spent riding
with America’s most notorious motorcycle gang. But it was a June
1970 article entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”
that he wrote for Scanlon’s, a short-lived sports magazine, which signaled his arrival.
Thompson was breaking under the pressure of the Scanlon’s deadline.
“I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work,” Thompson said years later. “So
finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering
them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article
I would ever do for anybody. Then when it came out, there was a
massive number of letters, phone calls, congratulations, people calling
it a great breakthrough in journalism.”
One of those letters came from fellow journalist Bill Cardoso, whom
Thompson had met while covering the Nixon campaign two years
earlier. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing,” wrote Cardoso,
“but you’ve changed everything. It’s totally gonzo.” And so was
born the name that would come to describe Thompson’s distinctive
journalistic style.
Thompson wasn’t alone in developing innovative journalistic
techniques in the ’60s. The New Journalists — with Jimmy Breslin,
Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Terry Southern, John Sack and James
Mills at the centre — were applying techniques of fiction to their
work, constantly stretching the definitions of journalism. As a result,
they were attacked by the journalistic and literary old guards in a
novelist fashion.
Impressionism was the point. As Wolfe wrote in The New Journalism, “It seemed all-important to ‘be there’ when dramatic scenes
took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions,
the details of the environment. The idea was to give the full objective
description, plus something that readers had always had to go to
novels and short stories for, namely, the subjective or emotional life
of the characters.”
But Thompson differed from the New Journalists in two important
ways: he became an increasingly central element in the stories he
was covering, and his preoccupation with getting the story became
the major part of the story. Process became art. Jeffrey Steinbrink, a
scholar of both Thompson and Mark Twain, notes that, “While the
New Journalist’s chief means of acknowledging the subjectivity of his
work is stylistic, the gonzo writer, in addition to maintaining an idiosyncratic style, takes a major part among his own dramatis personae.”
Like the New Journalist, the gonzo journalist relies heavily on the
subjective and is thus vulnerable to the criticism that his work is
fiction. But Thompson maintained that his writing placed a great
premium on truth. “It is a style of ‘reporting,’” he often said, “based
on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more ‘true’
than any kind of journalism.”
After Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had appeared in two Rolling
Stone installments in the fall of 1971, publisher Jann Wenner wanted more gonzo. The next year, Thompson became Rolling Stone’s
chief political correspondent, and hopped on George McGovern’s
bus to document his campaign against Richard Nixon. Thompson
produced Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail ’72, described
by The Nation as “one of the best books about American politics in
the last decade.” The New York Times deemed it the “best account
yet published of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of
the American political process.”
But if participation in the story is the sine qua non of gonzo
journalism, not being there leaves a gonzo journalist impotent.
Without direct experience, the gonzo journalist lacks the vehicle
through which he provides insight. As a result, he can offer only
empty, subjective rhetoric. Case in point: unable to participate in
the trial, Thompson was forced to cover the 1973 Watergate hearings for Rolling Stone from a television set. McKeen says, “All he
could do was comment, and that distance from the action renders
the Watergate pieces enjoyable but not — as his campaign reporting
had been — incisive.”
Thompson differed from
the New Journalists in two
important ways: he became an
increasingly central element
in the stories he was covering,
and his preoccupation with
getting the story became
the major part of the story.
Process became art
After the 1973 hearings, Thompson continued to keep a distance
from the action, rendering his later work lacklustre, much of it aimed
only at maintaining his reputation as a fringe hero searching for
truths. Whereas his older work was self-centred in order to provide
access to a greater story, his later work was singularly self-centred,
the greater story taking a backburner to egoism. The recent U.S.
presidential election brought Thompson back to the national affairs
desk at Rolling Stone, but “Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004, Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson sounds off on the fun-hogs in the passing lane,”
(November 2004) is, like his Watergate pieces, lacking in insight.
Like most great innovators, Thompson continues to inspire countless imitators. But no one will ever be able to capture the insight
and hilarity that Thompson brought so easily to his work. Gonzo
was both a revelation and a revolution, but more than anything, it
was what Thompson did, and so as we mourn his death, we must
also mourn the death of gonzo, a style that lived and died with
Hunter Thompson.
– Dave McGinn
BOOKS
Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe, and the
Crisis Over Iraq, (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2004), 266 pp.
“Americans are from Mars, Europeans
are from Venus”: so goes the argument
laid out in 2003 by American academic
Robert Kagan in his book Of Paradise
and Power. According to Kagan and his
neo-con buddies, there is a fundamental
difference between the foreign policy
mindsets of Europeans and Americans.
The latter are principled and determined
actors, willing and able to use force internationally, while the former are naïve
pacifists, completely disinclined to use
their slowly atrophying armed forces in
any meaningful way. For many, especially in the United States, this argument
continues to hold water as a coherent
explanation for the ongoing squabbles
that have plagued transatlantic relations
since the beginning of the diplomatic
crisis over Iraq.
Not so for Jeremy Shapiro and Philip
Gordon. In Allies at War, these two
Brookings Institution scholars contend
that the stand-off over Iraq was not the
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product of basic disagreements over the
use of force. They do much to debunk
the myth that France only opposed the
U.S. in the UN Security Council in order
to protect its Middle Eastern commercial
interests. Further, they dispel the notion
that George W. Bush was motivated to
attack Iraq only by the promise of control over the nation's vast oilfields.
Certainly, there are real differences
in how Europeans and Americans view
matters of security in the post-9/11
world. The two sides of the Atlantic
viewed the danger represented by Saddam Hussein in dissimilar ways and, of
course, there were considerable financial
interests at stake for both sides. However,
these differences need not have lead to
the spectacular diplomatic dust-ups that
rocked both NATO and the UN Security
Council in the spring of 2003. Instead,
Gordon and Shapiro advance a more
nuanced argument, laying the blame on
“diplomatic mistakes, personality clashes,
unfortunate timing, faulty analysis and
bad luck.”
Whether you submit to Shapiro and
Gordon’s line of thinking or prefer
Kagan’s reductionist worldview, Allies
at War provides piercing insight into
the development of the current transatlantic rift because it offers a blowby-blow account of the diplomatic
wrangling that ignited this fracture
in the first place. Shapiro and Gordon
do an excellent job of depicting both
the diplomatic personalities involved
and the political forces that motivated
them. However, at times Allies at War
seems to rely too heavily on diplomatic
conjecture (probably inevitable given
the ongoing sensitivity of the subject
matter) and is a bit thin in its consideration of the effect of the Iraq crisis on
the future of transatlantic relations.
Despite its shortcomings, Allies at War
still manages to provide an insightful,
critical and sober analysis of a debate
that has been heretofore characterized
by overblown rhetoric and chauvinistic
posturing. Given the importance of the
Atlantic alliance to the continued maintenance of international stability and
security, politicos and diplomats on both
sides of the Atlantic would do well to
draw inspiration from this approach.
– Justin Fraterman
Melissa P., 100 Strokes of the Brush Before
Bed, trans. Lawrence Venuti, (New York:
Grove Press, 2004), 176 pp.
Morbid obsession with young sexuality
is nothing new. From Glaucon in Plato’s
Republic to Dolores Haze in Nabokov’s
Lolita, the ripe and erotic youth has long
been an appealing fixture of Western
literature. Even so, the current appetite
for the account of a young teen’s determined sexual rackets, demonstrated
by the stunning success of Melissa P.’s
100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, is
eyebrow-raising. After all, what could a
fourteen-year old have to say about sex
that could be so intriguing to girls and
boys of all ages?
Critics have rightly praised P.’s oddly
potent and pure narrative. Some have
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even cast the diary as a literary response
to Nabokov: the account Lolita’s Dolores
Haze never gave to Humbert Humbert.
However true this comment, reflections
on the ultimate merits of 100 Strokes of
the Brush Before Bed are irrelevant to the
reason why you’ll read it. This is erotica
of the very most seductive sort. When
entering the exuberantly naïve world of
P., one is inevitably brought back to one’s
own first sexual experiences, whatever
their nature.
Forced down between a male companion’s legs, the Sicilian schoolgirl describes
her first encounter with the Unknown: “It
smelled male, and every vein that crossed
it expressed such power that I felt dutybound to reckon with it.” From here she
aggressively pursues a sexual education
including violent group sex, heavy bondage, encounters with other girls and the
occasional transvestite.
Interestingly enough, however, the
accounts of sex are generally cold and
unsentimental. We learn that P.’s nymphomania is less about penetration than
the passions she feels or hopes will accompany it. P. revels in the tremendous
power she finds in her sexuality. She
delights in her ability to turn men astray,
such as the dour math teacher who
frantically betrays his ethical principles
through his lust.
More fundamentally, P. is driven by
longing for the passion of love. As she
writes on the book’s very first page, “I
want love, Diary! I want to feel my heart
melt, want to see my icy stalactites shatter and plunge into a river of passion
and beauty.” By abandoning her body
to the desires of others, P. imagines she
can bring herself closer to love, a point
of confusion about which this work, of
course, can offer no answers.
100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed offers a clouded but revealing glimpse into
the potency of desire and its enduring
reign over our choices and relationships.
P.’s ultimate conquest proves not to be
the whimpering older man she penetrates
from behind or the chauvinistic older
brother who collapses in tears into her
lap, but the many wilful readers devouring her irresistibly stirring account.
– Joanna Baron
Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st
Century, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2004), 137 pp.
With the ascendancy of the liberal
democratic order as the preferred and
effective means of national governance,
Francis Fukuyama, the controversial
Johns Hopkins University professor,
pronounced the end of history in his
work The End of History and the Last
Man. The collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, coupled with trends to liberalize and decentralize many of the world’s
regimes seemed to push security issues to
the backburner, leaving the liberal democratic West virtually unchallenged.
Then 9/11 happened and security
reinstated itself as the foremost interstate issue. And so with his new book,
State-Building: Governance and World
Order in the 21st Century, Fukuyama addresses this new world order, in which
non-state actors play a decisive role. But
how, in a world composed of sovereign
nation-states, have non-state actors, in
particular terrorists, had such disproportionate influence? The answer is weak
states, and their eradication is the focus
of Fukuyama’s book. As he says, “weak
or failed states are the source of…the
world’s most serious problems.”
The first of the book's three main
sections describes statehood and what
constitutes a strong or a weak state.
Strong states have governments with
great strength (the capability of enforcing mandates) but limited scope, while
weak states have governments with great
scope and limited strength. And so statebuilding becomes an exercise in moving
these weak, developing countries from
the latter to the former position.
But there’s an assumption here,
reminiscent of Fukuyama's argument
in The End of History, that states want
to become liberal democracies. One can
only hope that the act of state-building will prove this to be the case, but
as the book’s main premise, it’s weak.
Too often the language of international
relations fails to include normative considerations. Democratization requires
that nation-states have, as Alexis de
Tocqueville coined, self-interest wellunderstood. It may take more than
increasing state strength to make the
desire for democracy a reality.
The second section is a practical guide
to bridging the developmental divide, the
“art" of state-building itself, and it concerns itself with fostering the domestic
demand for institutional development.
But how to achieve such development
is not addressed. How to build the institutions once they are desired is also
unclear, but that’s because, according to
Fukuyama, there is no model that can be
applied across the board. Hence his use
of the term art as opposed to science in
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describing state-building. It is, in many
ways, a local affair.
Here is the work’s chief weakness,
which is perhaps not Fukuyama’s own
but a problem of developmental theories
generally. He argues that successful states
can only be built on a case by case basis,
making a comprehensive theory of statebuilding impossible. Other than basic
principles that are universally applicable
(for example, that strong states must all
be capable of enforcing the rule of law),
there are no best practices in making
weak states stronger. So Fukuyama isn’t
getting at anything more substantial than
identifying that weak states are indeed a
problem and that they have to change.
The final section concerns itself with
the following question: which actor, if
any, has the legitimacy to intervene in
a sovereign, albeit weak, state’s affairs?
Fukuyama dismisses the European world
view, which favours multilateralism
and international organizations. Instead
he supports the more realistic, though
perhaps less ambitious, American view,
which sees international institutions not
as supra-national and legitimate but as
organizations composed of self-interested nation-states, with little authority to
constrain the behaviour of other states,
especially in matters of security.
Despite the tendency toward assumption-based premises, it’s easy to
sympathize with Fukuyama’s worldview. Weak states are a fundamental
problem: democratizing the world, the
fundamental solution. But as a practical
guide his work isn’t useful. Throughout,
it’s difficult to know which weak states
he’s referring to. Sometimes he seems to
be referring to poverty stricken African
countries, at other times, to authoritarian
regimes in the Middle East. Would Iraq,
with its high level of bureaucratic development, have been considered a weak
state? Wouldn’t authoritarian regimes be
considered strong states? In which case,
wouldn’t increasing their state strength
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be detrimental to the West?
But Fukuyama’s biggest challenge lies
with a problem I have already identified,
that with no universal way of dealing
with development issues, this book can
only raise awareness of the general issues
of state-building. Is it enough? I must say
yes. Practicalities aside, in State-Building
Fukuyama has identified a central question that the world faces today: Can there
be a general theory of development? In
having raised this question, this book has
undeniably shown its importance.
– Carrie Fiorillo
Paris Hilton, Merle Ginsburg and Jeff Vespa, Confessions of an Heiress: A Tonguein-Chic Peek Behind the Pose, (New York:
Fireside, 2004), 208 pp.
Confessional literature, the written acknowledgment of sin and the desire for
atonement, is a time-honoured tradition.
One starts with Confessions (c. 400 A.D.),
the quintessential spiritual autobiography, in which St. Augustine emerges from
psychological anguish to self-revelation.
Secular intellectual autobiographies include Rousseau’s Confessions (1770) and
Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an
Opium Eater (1822); recent confessional
poetry, centering on the innermost mental reflections of the poet, includes works
by Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath.
To this literary landscape comes an
unlikely figure, Paris Hilton, who, with
Confessions of an Heiress: A Tonguein-Chic Peek Behind the Pose, applies
a fresh coat of lip-gloss to a chapped
literary genre. In one telling confession,
Hilton admits: “Stupid stuff can happen.
Recently, I was at a major Hollywood
party — everyone was there — and I
stepped into a little pond covered with
flowers. I didn’t see it because of the
flowers, plus I was on the phone.”
A lot of “stupid stuff” happens in Hilton’s
Confessions, a self-mythologizing project
in which the author shamelessly flogs her
product. The opening section serves as a
half-ironic “how to” guide for teeny-bopping, would-be heiresses. “It’s about feeling entitled,” she instructs, “All you need
after that is a good handbag, a great pose,
and very high heels, and you’re on your
way. (Long blond hair doesn’t hurt, either).” Elsewhere, the book dips into keen
observational humour, Paris-style: “Yes, I
admit I’ve taken the subway in New York
— and it smells. It literally smells like pee.
Why can’t they do anything about that?”
Later, the starlet reveals her inner fashionista. “I love yellow, it’s sunny…” she
says, proving, once and for all, that she
knows her colours.
Hilton, it must be admitted, is an
uncommon kind of star. Her rise is inextricably linked to two of the most important cultural developments in recent
memory: the Internet (her homemade
hardcore rocketed her to megastar status)
and, more recently, reality TV. It is inconceivable to imagine a phenomenon like
Hilton existing in any historical moment
outside of our own. In the realm of confessional literature, however, Confessions
of an Heiress amounts to little more than
a colourful speck of mildew on a genre
that — for better or worse — endures.
– Ira Wells
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Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 308 pp.
If globalization were a person, it would
surely be in the midst of an identity
crisis. Depending on whom you ask or
which book you read, globalization may
be a force for evil or good in the world.
Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent international trade economist, has weighed in
on the debate with a nuanced defence
of the latter view.
In Defense of Globalization, which
uses the infamous term primarily to
denote international trade and foreign direct investment, is largely an
attempt to reach out to the anti-globalization camp to strike up healthy
debate. In response to the plethora
of concerns articulated by the antiglobalizers — environmental destruction, child labour, workers’ rights and
wages, equality, and others — Bhagwati tenders a single question: Has
economic globalization caused or
worsened these problems? Bhagwati’s
answer is either a straight no, or “the
jury is still out.” He insists that eco-
nomic globalization actually helps
alleviate many of these problems.
Bhagwati takes the commonly cited
link between growing economic globalization and increasing inequality
between nations as a case-in-point.
While international economic inequality may have increased in recent
decades, he asserts, the countries
that have actually fallen behind are
those that have not seen an increase
in trade. Conversely, China, India
and other nations that have pursued
pro-trade policies have increased their
standards of living, narrowing the gap
with wealthy states. Actually, says
Bhagwati, trade deficits account for
much of the rising inequality.
Bhagwati’s attempt to address so
many criticisms of globalization renders him over-stretched at times. In
his chapter on culture, for example,
Bhagwati carelessly lumps the rejection
of McDonald’s by French nationalists
in the same category as the struggles
of small indigenous groups trying to
maintain autonomy. Whisking readers
back to the days of safari hat anthropology, Bhagwati declares: “Indigenous
peoples will have to confront the fact
that the old yields to the new. Only active nurturing of the collective memory
and a selective preservation of cultural
artifacts can be a response, not the
impractical fossilization of traditional
attitudes and values.”
But in chapters covering poverty,
wages, labour standards and the environment, Bhagwati is great. His “correlation does not equal causation" thesis,
along with countless academic studies
and anecdotes, makes a compelling
case for deeper analysis of globalization issues.
The book provides no shortage of
opportunities for disagreement, but all
readers will benefit immensely from this
thoughtful reflection on globalization.
– Dean Foster
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 293 pp.
So Bob does remember the ’60s after
all. When it was first announced that Bob
Dylan was writing this autobiography,
the rumour swiftly spread that he wanted
friends, fans and acquaintances to jog
his failing memory. Whether he received
the help or not, the opening and closing
chapters of Chronicles: Volume One form
a vivid account of the early days of his
singing career in New York, even before
he had set down his first original lyric.
It’s winter 1961, and Dylan is playing
the Gaslight with Paul Clayton and Dave
Van Ronk, reading Balzac and Robert
Graves, falling in love with dark-haired
beauty Suze Rotolo and visiting the
ailing Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey
hospital. The sequence of events might
be jumbled, but the freewheeling, chaotic
Village culture and its influence on the
sensitive disposition of the erstwhile R.
A. Zimmerman is brilliantly captured.
This book will ultimately frustrate anyone looking to break through the mask of
Dylan’s public persona. It focuses mainly
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chapters devoted to the troubled inception of two of his most under-rated albums, New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy
(1989). When his personal life does slide
into view, it’s usually discussed in relation to his song-writing, or, as in the New
Morning section, in terms of his frustration at being appointed the “spokesman
of a generation” — when all he dreamt
of was a nine-to-five and a house with
a white picket fence. Some might find
his allusive, folksy and rather scattershot
prose wearying, though for me reading
Chronicles was almost as great a pleasure
as listening to Dylan’s peerless corpus of
songs. Just as with “Gates of Eden” and
“Tangled Up in Blue,” the fun’s to be had
in filling in the blanks.
– Christopher Trigg
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to
Modernity, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2004), 284 pp.
The geopolitical rift between France
and the U.S. has whet appetites for patriotic polemic on both sides of the Atlantic.
So when the matron of the first family
of American neo-conservatism describes
her new book as an attempt to rescue the
Enlightenment “from the French who
have dominated and usurped it,” minds
that are wired for crossfire inevitably
take note.
Reading the newspaper reviews, one
might suppose that this book is but an
historically informed Rumsfeldian barb
against “Old Europe.” This is unfair. The
Roads to Modernity is a serious work,
and it is historical before it is politically
practical. Still, it is difficult to deny the
patriotic intimations here. Himmelfarb,
a “big idea” intellectual historian,
sees vital continuities between our era
and the age of Enlightenment. Thus,
the choices that America, Britain and
France made in the 18th century about
God, morality, and freedom still resonate in the social and political structures of these nations.
Himmelfarb lays much responsibility
for the direction of these intellectual
cultures at the doors of their great thinkers, such as Hume, Burke, Voltaire and
Madison. Yet she is careful not to box
these thinkers into national boundaries,
and, when writing about their doctrines,
she cheerfully notes points of agreement
across borders. In the same spirit, she
mostly ignores the ideas of Rousseau,
surely a crucial Enlightenment figure
but perhaps too slippery to include
amongst the “French” philosophes. Yet,
in terms of the influence of doctrines,
Himmelfarb draws stark national lines.
According to Himmelfarb, British and
American thinkers helped their nations
prudently balance and even intertwine
seemingly contradictory forces: commercialism and compassion, liberty and
religion. The philosophes’ ideological
attachment to reason, on the other
hand, tilted the French towards hasty
abandonment of previously established
religious and moral dogma. This is
very much a traditional narrative: the
moderation of the British, the amazing
paradoxical compromises of the Americans, the recklessness of the French. It’s
a good story, and Himmelfarb is sticking
with it.
The heroes of Himmelfarb’s version
are the Scots. Unlike the philosophes,
says Himmelfarb, their counterparts
in Scotland were unwilling to entrust
morality to what Adam Smith called
the “slow and uncertain determinations
of our reason.” Reason could never be
a reliable guide for ordering human
life on a wide scale, and the Scots
recognized this. Instead of relying on
reason, Himmelfarb notes approvingly,
the Scots grounded morality in natural
sentiment, where its voice could be
widely accessible.
Himmelfarb’s goal is to explain intellectual orthodoxies adopted in the
various countries, and she does so with
great dexterity. Yet the work does not
fully reckon with the political teachings it invokes. Himmelfarb is noticeably quiet, for example, about the
parts of Adam Smith’s writing which
display deep ambivalence about the
moral consequences of the politicaleconomic system he articulates. Indeed,
Smith sounded a note of regret about
the future, acknowledging that the important human virtues might fade and
be replaced by a prudent, widespread,
but ultimately limited kind of goodness. Himmelfarb does not account
for Smith’s curious lament for virtue,
which has provided intellectual sustenance to critics both left and right of a
kind of modern, commercial life which
is still in many ways our own.
This silence, however, does not constitute a major flaw of the work. Himmelfarb’s crucial point of concern is the
role of big ideas and the outcomes they
helped produce. The book is a thoughtprovoking account of some powerful
ideas at work.
– Neil Rogachevsky
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The World in Review
Our guru of disinformation reflects
on global developments
By Danny Shenkman
Somewhere between revelling in the Raptors' quasi-resurgence in the post-Vince era, and
struggling to get over the 95 percent hump in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, it dawned
on me: I’m not a kid anymore. It was a sad realization, made even sadder when I discovered,
upon consulting my bedside bible, that Miss January was born in 1985. I’d love to say that I’m
the same person I was when I left university less than a year ago, but I have to face the facts.
At school, I didn’t even know they still made a nine in the morning, and now I get effed in
the a by it daily. I spend all day staring at a computer screen and I can barely stay awake long
enough to catch The Daily Show, let alone Conan.
It’s a sad state of affairs, and I've only been working for six months. I thought that when
I joined the real world, with the days of four-twenties and the nights of Olde English behind
me, staying on top of current events would be a piece of cake. Turns out it isn’t, and I recently
realized that I needed to take action before I officially became out of touch. My solution: to
re-immerse myself in the world of news and pop culture and recapture a piece of my lost
youth. Mustard and cheese sandwich in hand, I started what would become an enlightening
journey with my trusty television.
It only took a couple of news segments for me to see that things haven’t changed that much
since I was in school. Iraq, despite bursting at the seams with newfound democracy, remains
the herpes of American foreign policy — occasionally dying down, but never really going
away. Michael Jackson is once again facing grievous accusations of pedophilic sexual abuse,
though in his defence, Bad is a really awesome album. China and Taiwan are still at each
other’s throats after 50 years of conflict. Last week it looked like the two sides had reached a
peaceful agreement. Unfortunately, about a half hour after the talks concluded, they were back
at it in full force. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised; isn’t that always the case with
Chinese feud?
I needed less Mansbridge and more Lohan so I flipped to MuchMusic, the network that
supposedly has its finger of the pulse of Canadian youth. I started with an episode of their
flagship show, MuchOnDemand, where Canadian Idol winner Kalan Porter was being interviewed about the difficulties of representing the thousands of people who voted for him.
Porter’s response presented me with a new challenge. How can I reconnect with a demographic
fixated on the career of a talking donkey penis? To make things worse, I also had to come to
terms with the fact that, unbeknownst to me, the Master T era at MuchMusic had come to an
end. Next thing you know, Monica Deol won’t be hosting Electric Circus anymore.
I continued flipping and came across a show I'd heard much about but never seen: The O.C.
I'd resisted for a while, not wanting 90210 to take a back seat to anything. But watching an
episode, I learned some West Coast lessons that 90210, Saved By The Bell or even California
Dreams never taught me. Did you know that if your mother has slept with your boyfriend's
adopted mother's father, shoplifting and pill popping is an acceptable solution? Or that every
Southern Californian over the age of twelveteen is more sexually active than I am? I must
acknowledge that the torch has been passed from West Beverly to Harbor High. But, as Bev
Hills fades off into the sunset, can someone please explain to me why I can buy season one of
Alf and Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman on DVD but not 90210? Scott Scanlon must be rolling
over in his grave.
I have to admit that I'm not the young man I used to be. I can wax nostalgic about the days
when I scored five touchdowns in one game for Polk High, and I can be glad that when it was
my turn, I puff-puff-gave ’er. But those days are behind me now, so I'll do the next best thing
— watch some re-runs. The real world can wait just a little longer.
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St-Ambroise Pale Ale
The finer things in life
www.mcauslan.com