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Monday, April 25, 2011

The Top Ten Worst Ideas in the History of Philosophy

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1. I will take your silence as assent (Plato)
2. That which is useful, is inherently good (Bentham)
3. Doing and Being have nothing to do with one another (Agamben)
4. We live in the best of all possible worlds (Liebniz)
5. Everything is Permitted (Sartre)
6. Do what thou wilt (Crowley)
7. The truth is in ideal forms (Plato)
8. There is no place for the poet in the Republic (Plato)
9. The king is god’s representative on earth (any number of court philosophers)
10. Nothing is true but that which is willed (Stirner)

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Scenes from a War: Episode 2

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Hold on to your eyeballs!

Rockets fire out of a mini-tank. Cheap generic drug export and import. Infra-red cameras on the missiles. Lives on auto-destruct. The Canadarm takes lasers, whose application has been mostly medical in spite of how they were envisioned in Star Wars, and uses them as a guidance system rather than for their destructive potential. But mostly to zap poppy milk into arms.

In that case, people will need to be programmed. Conditioned. Boundaries must be surveyed, enforced, guarded. Negative and Positive reinforcement.

Luckily, we can Youtube videos to propagate the fields of flander. Slander through spillage. Pushing through blood and so modulate exactly what you hear. Shock filters, Bomb-deafness, snow-blindness. Leverage opportunism. Blood spatter, drops on sand.

Information jamming. Future shock non-sequitor global village, local pillage. Trophies of the battlefield, the dessicate surface of earth, war of the worlds. Dan Ackroyd with a bazooka, firing indiscriminately and aufhebung-ing Destructive explosions.

What this war needs is a snappy jingle. Don’t die for my Libyan beans. And Don’t forget the button-happy tact-island. Enjoy the slaughter. It’s going to happen anyway, so you might as well. Either that, or you have to. Those boots in your closet scare the shit out of me, but not enough to stop me from being able to mock-up a pie graph, a pig’s head on a stick, tea in a human skull.

I will be polite to you before I stick this bayonette through your midsection. Mad max out the Robinsonade.

Mel Gibson called and tried to order some more crazy for a kickstart. Gossip for him is like Red Bull: he does it to stay awake and alert. His breath killed a small village in Africa. But I had to tell him, we were fresh out of crazy. Seriously, the person who walked in the store before you called bought the last little bottle of crazy. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? The next battle will be broadcast live on a channel that projects its visions directly on the eyeball.

Monday, March 07, 2011

Scenes from a War: Bowdlerized Popcult

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Scenes from a War: Episode 1

Conan the barbarians knock on the gate with battering-rams. Cablecars and dastardly painters come for the moving parts. Oops I peeled my monitor off its frame. Fires from torches lick the sky above the gates, pointed tree trunks, maybe birch, accident waiting to happen there eh? And the persistant orgy of yells and grumbling on the other side sounds like a flag. Moanmar Khaddafi and Charlie Sheen were cooking up smores as everyone else geared up for the imminent battle. The marshmallows melted, and they were dripping down Sheen’s chin. And then Emilio Estevez climbed the gate with a pulley system, after which they hoisted up an enormous batch of boiling orange pekoe tea to pour on their enemy.

The women and children disappeared that night, and lookouts confirmed that the enemy was throwing them on a big bonfire right outside our front door. We loaded the slings with rubble and disgusting, rotting garbage. And some flaming olive oil. Emilio came back to my Bill-Pullman porter kiosk, and I hurriedly pasted my monitor back on the wall.

He asked me what on earth I was doing. My back is on the wall, I pointed out. Emilio looked at the painting at the opposite side of my room, and there I was, my back painted, me walking away from the painter. We need reinforcements, he said, and I dotted the eyes and crossed the tees on mutually assured destruction. But he said we don’t have to; they will just drink themselves silly and leave in the morning. I didn’t want to risk it, but he insisted, at which point, Gary Busey came in, and got out of his fat suit. He was naked, and had a gorgeous woman’s body.

I’m not taking appointments right now Gary. Retirement and carpet bombing is what I expect pleasantly. That’s all. Oh yeah, and Kelly Clarkson’s favourite CD, which I bought on the internet. We could always just fall on them, Khaddafi said. Death by fat. Gout had to be the co-conspirator. Maybe it would be more suitable to just cut his Achilles tendon and pee on the wound. Then Canada’s boyfriend came out with a piece of felt tied together with a round of raw rope. Undone, there were several sizes of shurikens, some dipped in adder venom. That’s just so you can say that you died like Cleopatra for all of a few seconds before you die when we kill you.

I swear at that moment, Kim Basinger flew in on flying dragon, you know, neverending story-style, and asked for whoever is in charge in our camp. Apparently, she’s an ambassador of the enemy. If there were ever an EILF, you know, an enemy I’d like to f#@&, there it was.

She told us she was there to talk peace terms. I said that we hadn’t even got a chance to cut anyone’s head off yet, and it’s not fair to end a war until you get to do what you enjoy most at least once, and have people say “Well, we were at war.” Not much to say to that.

Her dragon-thing took off, turned around, screeched and all that, and then took off. After that we heard a terrible whir as a bunch of glops of gravel and pebbles and sand were pitched into our eyes. And it burned. But she did warn me.

Charlie Sheen smiled crookedly. It’s time to get serious, he said. He waved his arm, and out of the corners of the room sprang an enormous army of porcupines to wander out on the battlefield. There, the enemy could fall, in disorientation caused by the lobbing of clothes drenched in whale sperm, rolled up into a ball and lit on fire, into their midst, on the many spines of the porcupines scrambling to get in and out of the way.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Windows Movie Maker Hypnosis

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Sunday, January 30, 2011

You can be gay, just keep it to yourself!


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Stephen Harper & John Baird tete-a-tete (ouch)


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Stephen Harper: Man, skyscrapers built by oil money make me horny. C'mon John, bend over!

John Baird: What's that prodding my... Oh you're kidding me right? I've been screwed so hard by the huge rise in small plane crashes since I've been transport minister, you're going to have to come with something bigger than that!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

An Ode to Patton Oswalt

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  • An Ode to Patton Oswalt

Saw you on your junket binge,

The Conan episode.

Frankly, Conan trying to be a ninja was preferable.

(and if you say it right, preferable

Does rhyme with episode)

You must be tired from all

That hard promo work, because

You weren’t off the wall funny.

Sunny days, but nothing you said

Made me laugh, your jokes were lead

Pipes with nothing in them…


I mean not even dangerous.


Your glib references to modernist poets

Failed to make me so wet

You know, down there.


Mr. vomit on the plane story

Did not even make sense, see?

I mean he’s on an airplane.

He must be good at something

Besides vomit and being strange.


Christopher Peet is funnier than you by far

Don’t know who he is? You sleep under the same stars

(ahem, dirty man, not like that). Don’t worry, the czar

Of guffaws might leave a tooth under your pillow.

So leave your door ajar.


I should have hit my own pillow sooner.

Your segment was a waste of time;

I could have found more amusement

Playing with a radio tuner.

But I still love you.

Monday, January 03, 2011

Moving parts, please.

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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Black Swan: Tchaikovsky meets Aronovsky


Black Swan is a new, terse psychological thriller from film festival darling Darren Aronovsky, featuring Natalie Portman playing a ballerina. Her character is as memorable as she is neurotic. Having been selected from her company to play the prestigious role of queen swan in Swan Lake, she descends into a frightful world that treads the border between delusion and social manipulation.

The director of the ballet, thinking she has some distance to travel into her dark side in order to appropriately play the Black Swan half of the part, seduces and torments her to push her into a schizoid state. Alternately leading her to believe that she will be replaced by a new dancer and that her arrival into the star system of ballet is imminent, he cruelly toys with her passion and her obvious fragility, which Portman's performs in an exhilarating and admirable manner.

Aronovsky lends the film psychological depth through the lead character's fraught relationship with her controlling mother, who seems obsessed with living out her fallen dreams vicariously through her daughter. This relationship is echoed in the plot through Nina's overtures to both her predecessor and heir apparent in the company's star system of primogeniture, as figurative mother/daughter relationships. The dethroned prima ballerina resents Nina, verbally accosting her at a fundraiser at which the director announces her retirement and her replacement's ascendence, calling her a whore.

The reality of some of the attacks on her competence, however, are subsequently destabilized in the plot through the introduction of hallucinogenic or delusional episodes. Beth, the former prima ballerina ridiculed by the other dancers for her age, is hospitalized after being hit by a car, and there are subtle suggestions that she is either the victim of the director's cruel whims or that she herself does this intentionally to express her discontent with the company, her waning star status, and to rattle the rest of company out of its rhythm.

To add to the intrigue of the ultra-competitive dance company, Nina's heir apparent seduces her as well, imploring her to live a little and relax her rigid discipline in order to "let herself go" and finally lose herself in her dancing. It becomes apparent finally that the director may have engineered this fatal ménage a trios -- between the director, Nina, and Lily -- to force Nina to plumb the depths of her soul and find its darkness, its aggressivity unto the basic predatory instinct expressed by the crime of murder. 

The anxiety-wracked climax of the film, during which there are continuous suggestions, even through the opening performance of the ballet, that her rival will replace her in the lead role, effectively keeps the viewer on their film-watching toes (pun intended). This climax leads to a violent confrontation in the dressing room between Nina and Lily, which has homicidal and suicidal overtones. The boundary between art and life becomes blurred for the brilliant protagonist.

This confrontation is the flip side of the erotic encounter between the two dancers a couple nights before the opening performance, seemingly precipitated by Lily surreptitiously spiking Nina's drink with MDMA. Lily denies this encounter happened, and this encounter figures as part of the psychological torment that Lily and the director inflict on Nina in order to evoke the best possible performance from her. This drugging incident could be sabotage, or it could be a conspiracy for Nina's benefit: the narrative evades closure and keeps the viewer anxiously guessing all the way until the end and beyond.

Some familiar Aronovsky tropes appear in Black Swan such as the blurred borders between madness and genius, the abject figure of abandoned and forgotten celebrity, and skin-crawling scenarios of gore. What is new is the virtuosity, the polish. This film is excellent on all counts: the cinematography is innovative and deeply creepy; the score is surprising and subtle, full of background bass wooshes and surround sound panning that generates voices that seem to emanate from outside the dark space of the cinema; the writing is solid; the acting is nuanced and bold. Also new are the beautiful sequences of dance, which feature long balletic shots where the camera transcends static reality and becomes a participant in the dancing, a partner to the protagonist in her dance.

This shows Arronovky's flirtation with versatility that is the sign of a truly gifted artist; he has achieved fluency in two poles of film language. On the one hand, in Requiem for a Dream, another of his films that features a harrowing climax, he gives the pivotal sequence its intensity through sophisticated editing and montage techniques. On the other hand, Black Swan takes the long shot to new dynamic heights. Rather than the aleatory tracking shots of Robert Altman's in Gosford Park, or the fantastical slow panning shots of Peter Greenaway in The Cook, His Wife, The Thief, and Her Lover, or the Hitchcock's attempt at a single-shot film in Rope, Black Swan introduces a mobile element to the long shot that is rare and masterful.

Aronovsky gives the psychological edge of this film expression through handheld camera shots, which he tastefully limits to avoid the nausea-inducing verisimilitude of The Blair Witch Project or  Cloverfield, and through shots following the protagonist as if the camera depicts a stalker's point of view. In this film, there is suspense a-plenty. 
 
Furthermore, the director avails himself of CGI technology in a similarly tasteful and unobtrusive way. There is no fetishization of technology for its own sake here. The uses to which he puts the dramatic digital manipulation of the film are governed by the internal logic of the film. Nina's skin at different points in the film bristles with energy, and the sores which her mother attributes to her neurotic scratching of her own back are also the site of the emergence of black feathers, signaling the transformation central to her performance of the Black swan and her negotiation of the binaries within herself.

This film features a spectacular synergy of talent; to miss it is to thumb your nose at film's inherent potentials. Bravo!

Friday, December 10, 2010

Artist Spotlight: Christopher Peet



Christopher Peet is a hardworking, local Toronto artist who has recently finished a painting entitled "Songs in the Tree of Life." While his previous work tended towards watercolours with a special emphasis on architectural detail, this painting explores universal themes in a surrealistic manner. He also teaches art, and he has contributed political cartoons to many Canadian newspapers and magazines.

Although the surrealistic influence is new, this painting still shows his meticulous rendering of the built world, with a wood-paneled dwelling dominating the top right third of the painting. Its blue eaves and window edges "rhyme" with the blue of the sky. The two dormers stick out of the house's face at improbable angles, the one in the background seeming subject to the pull of the arc of the brick structure. This structure itself suggests a bridge, with the water underneath likewise at a surprising angle to the bridge. This water is painted as if the viewer is looking into a well. The water is implied skillfully through the presence of ripples, but ultimately left transparent, so the viewer can see a small clutch of narwhales.


To the right of the painting, the bricks lose their cohesiveness in a furious fire that evokes creation and destruction simultaneously. Creation is suggested through the connotative association of bricks to the ovens in which the materials of earth are transformed into bricks by human labour. All the elements are represented. A herd of land animals gathers at the apex of the brick bridge; narwhales swim in the pebble-bedded well water; and two butterflies dominate the air in the upper left third of the painting. The tree, emerging out of the clouds in the sky, is an organism of the earth; half of the tree in reality -- the root system -- hides underground.


The herd of animals on the bridge are painted in a more ambiguous manner than the incredible detail of other areas of the painting. When I spoke with the artist, he said he painted pairs of animals – giraffes, elephants, seals, deer, and bears – to represent in partial form the story of Noah's Ark, which puns on the arc-like curve of many of the lines of the painting. Putting the focus on the butterflies effectively challenges the tradition of centering the focus of the painting, and emphasizes the notion of transformation.


The "tree of life" ironically has no leaves, and its Kabbalistic and Edenic connotations tease out the both biblical and materialist resonances of the painting in a refreshingly complex way. At the right side of the painting, the artist's hand is painted, in the act of reaching for the house. This implies both the human influence over the material world: our active re-shaping of the world around us, as well as the longing for home and shelter. Below the hand and above the house are planetary bodies; the red one evokes mars and earth respectively.


The point of view of the painting is not grounded in one point around which the perspective is arranged; it is deployed in a diffuse, if not fragmentary manner. That earth's various manifestations are visible to the viewer at the same time as the earth itself, as if from space, presents us with a surreal assemblage. In this dream-like scene, we are granted the privilege of seeing things we could never see juxtaposed in real life.


I see some modernist echoes in this painting as well. The tree in the sky is reminiscent of Magritte's floating Castle, which itself perhaps referred to Kafka's novel of the same name. And the transformation of earth into building materials and elements is evocative of Diego Rivera's murals at the Detroit Institute of Art.


"Songs in the Tree of Life" is being sold for $8000. Its size is 24 x 24", and it is acrylic on canvas. You can get a high-quality print for $500 or $600 depending on whether you want it printed on canvas or paper (canvas is the more expensive), and there are extra charges up to $125 depending on how you want it framed and stretched (regular: $100, gallery-style: $125). You can visit him on the web here: http://www.christopherpeet.com/index.html.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The man who knew too much

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The Man Who Knew Too Much,
starring in A Family Romance


The man who knew too much
had no qualities,
no dirty laundry, no new lush policies
to plant like new year’s resolutions
in eroded soil.

Even to grow flush at a function
was too much, his speech
ragged and frag-mushed into gruelling
sounds that leeched the boisterous
of their fun-blood.

The man who knew too much
stayed cool, even under gunfire,
but one well-placed, orchestrated
scream undid everything he knew,
mesmer music strode not on
rails, but in bubbles,
full sinuses popping with blood.

The man who knew too much
kept messages hidden in the pill
bottle, the medicine cabinet, a little
toiletries bag you take on long trips,
when you are driven along by horse-drawn carriages,
the ghost of Franz Ferdinand, and
jolly everymen drawn into rings
of political intrigue.

Like smoke rings out of Teddy Roosevelt’s
head at Mt. Rushmore, we
take care it never happens to us.

Revenge is a dish best served cold,
but what do we do in this steambath
called the family romance?

Thursday, September 30, 2010


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Direct Action activist Nokolai Alexeyev has been working hard with his organization Gay Russia to improve the conditions of the LGBT community in Russia. Although homosexuality was decriminalized there in 1993, many prohibitions and persecutions remain. After successfully revoking the blood ban on gay men (which, incidentally is still in effect in Canada because Blood Services is an NGO), his group has embarked on direct actions to support all facets of LGBT rights. Recently, Alexeyev was arrested for his active organization of Pride marches in Moscow, which have been formally banned by Moscow's homophobic mayor. He was held for 2 days without access to a lawyer and harassed because he had refused to remove his shoes at a security check at an airport.

New concerns about Alexeyev's safety have emerged, which you can read about here: http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2010/09/new-concerns-for-safety-of-nikolai-alexeyev.html

What can we do to help?

Well, first of all, since Canada has identified Russia as a "Trade Priority," as shown in the chart above, you can write to your local MP to encourage them raise the issue of Russia's treatment of the LGBT community in concert with their trade agreements to ensure that their human rights are respected. Our minister of trade is Stockwell Day, so you can also write to him. Collect signatures on your letters for greater effect.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Love Life, Despairing Love


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Monday, August 30, 2010

Nolan Returns to his Roots

Inception is the blockbuster of the summer, which is basically the season of blockbusters in the North American film industry, having made $622 551 540 in box office receipts worldwide so far. It is also the latest film by Christopher Nolan, who is rapidly becoming James Cameron's biggest competition for Hollywood's most popular director. Fresh off his record-smashing and billion dollar success The Dark Knight, Nolan seems to be returning to the narrative techniques and themes of his first film Memento. He also seems to have shed the more "cutesy," if totally extraneous, aspects of blockbusterism, largely borrowed from the repertoire of Stephen Spielberg, such as the scene in The Dark Knight when the two boys are pretending to shoot a car that subsequently explodes during the chase sequence where the Joker is trying to abduct two-face Harvey Dent from his police escort. His return to his roots is a good thing.

For one thing, his challenging narrative technique, which has baffled even some critics, pays due respect to the intelligence of the audience. It panders to intelligence rather than the lack thereof. Secondly, the theme of memory repressed from the outside-in, a clever reversal of the by-now familiar psychoanalytic account of memory repressed from the inside out as a result of trauma, makes a powerful return. Whereas the protagonist of Memento has his memory stolen as a result of a head trauma caused by a vicious assault, in Inception there is a developing tension between the protagonist's increasingly dangerous and uncontrollable memories of his wife, and his vocation. As an extractor, his job is to steal people's memories by sharing their dreams, and with his team, to provide the space within which the dream occurs. As such, Inception shares with Memento a non-linear narrative structure and the themes of memory, grief, and loss.

That said, Inception, I would argue, is not quite as well-rounded achievement as Memento. I think it is a very good film, and not in the sense of it's good . . .
for a blockbuster, but on its own terms. It is complex, novel, has interesting characters, especially the aptly-named Ariadne, who functions in the film as a kind of conscience for Leonardo Di Caprio's character, much like Harper Lee figured as Truman Capote's conscience in Capote. Ariadne, in Greek mythology, was mistress of the labyrinth, weaver, and wife of Dionysis. Her job in the film is to design the spaces within which the shared dream of the inception job occurs. The protagonist recruits her from the best of his father's students, and his test of her is figured in terms of her ability to spontaneously generate labyrinths.

One of the exciting elements of this movie is the aspects of visual culture it draws upon. Without realizing it, I've been waiting for a film to take on the paradoxical and perspectivally warped work of M.C. Escher. Indeed, the scenes where Ariadne learns to share dreams, especially the one where Ariadne takes the streets of Paris and folds them into a three-dimensional box, are obviously directly inspired by the work of Escher. The scene where she takes two mirrors and faces them together, creating the illusion of infinity is also suggestive of the visual art of Escher, and the fictional world of Jorge Luis Borges. However, this trick has of course been done already in a film – Habla Con Ella, by Pedro Almadovar – and to a greater effect in the scene where that film's protagonist meets his friend in the confines of a prison to explain his rape of a comatose patient. But the folding Paris scene is great in that it subordinates the potential of new digital techniques in a film to a strong concept and challenging narrative, rather than fetishizing the technique as a value-in-itself, as happens in films such as The Transformers.

The fantasy world of the protagonist and his wife is also the urban dreamscape of modernist architect Le Courbusier. That this world is crumbling by the end of the film is fitting seeing as some cultural critics, such as Charles Jenks, locate the beginning of postmodernism in the destruction of a Le Courbusier-inspired Pruitt-Igoe neighbourhood in St. Louis.

While Nolan uses the nested narrative technique effectively to create the disorientating experience of being in a dream within a dream, and, later, a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, the writing isn't as strong or memorable as it is in The Dark Knight. It also doesn't have the awe-inspiring performance of a Heath Ledger to guide it through its weaker spots. Don't get me wrong, the performances are good; it's just that none of them scream "Oscar" to me. Di Caprio does a solid job of playing a man damaged by a guilt that is preventing him from achieving his goal: a reunion with his children. Although I've always been a fan of Joseph-Gordon Levitt's film work, and his zero-gravity combat scene in the hotel is cool (not the parkour-inflected Casino Royale chase scene cool, but cool nonetheless) I still don't think any of the performances is worthy of an Oscar.

However, Inception's concept and narrative complexity are its strengths, and in the long run, they are both more important than the level of the actors' performances. Also, the score is strong, thankfully not overwrought as blockbuster scores tend to be, and it is considerably more interesting than The Dark Knight's score.

Overall, this is a film worth seeing at least once, although the caveat that you need to see it more than once to "get" it is a little exaggerated.