Parasol

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Yeah, I know him...

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Yeah, I dated him.
His pockets held dryer-hardened
Receipts, some foreign change,
Water proof matches
For when the world ends.
I put them there when I hugged him
From behind. Curve of intimacy:
Warmth: buffer.

His day timer was empty
But he was always busy, always
Running late for some appointment
But arriving early anyway.

He would hold his palms upward
When frustrated, as if the answer
To his vexation was a gravitous leaf
That would alight upon his hand,
And be read like tea grounds
In the bottom of a cup.

Asthma lungs, chemical sensitivities,
His jumbo-mumble lips
Skewed repetition. And thus, people
Scorned.

Seth saw him yesterday working in the bank.
He had a smile on his face.
The guy who never had anything
Good to say and I remember he once
Promised us he’d be prime minister
Had a smile on his face.

Smug bastard.

The Difference between Art and Advertizing

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The primary difference between art and advertizing is this: you seek art out, but advertizing seeks you out.

Friedrich Kittler vs. Marshall McLuhan

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Why the typewriter and not the keyboard?

The typewriter itself was not a revolutionary invention: it was the material interface between human subject and textual production that was revolutionary. The keyboard was the most important modular carry-over from the typewriter to the computer (and the cell phone!), and therefore, it is more important to the history of communications than the typewriter. Kittler, and McLuhan before him, are subdued by a synechdochial dyslexia, whereby they mistake the whole as a revolutionary innovation for the part that was more properly revolutionary. And, perhaps unfortunately, I mean revolutionary with regards to change: its apolitical meaning. In other words, this meaning indicates the revolution of technique has eclipsed the real revolution of socio-political reorganization and the liberation of human potential. The typewriter might have partially democratized print type production, but it was not the cybernetic module that really provided the interface between human and machine that the keyboard did until the intervention of the touch screen. Therefore, it is the keyboard that deserves the theoretical attention, NOT the typewriter.

Why Edison and not Tesla?

Here is where McLuhan was more on point than Kittler. He identified electrification as one of the key developments in modernity and technological history. Calling a stream of electrons a medium in itself was radically accurate. Who cares about the electric lightbulb when you have no means to distribute the very force that operates it? Tesla was the one who invented the transformer, and it was the single most important invention in the creation of technological modernity. I would contend that it was he, not Edison, who "invented invention," partially for the fact that Edison did not invent many of the things he is credited with. There is a popular misconception that because you patented something, you invented it. Any historian of film will tell you that the motion picture was the result of several different innovations combined, including George Eastman's Kodak celluloid filmstrip for photography. And it was Edison's assistant William Dickson who put in the lion's share of labour in developing the kinetoscope at Menlo Park. Edison really didn't have faith in the motion picture, either. He thought the public would soon tire of it as a novelty.

Furthermore, Kittler's focus on the Grammophone, the film, and the typewriter excludes a detailed consideration of radio, which as a medium has had a polemic history, but whose technology has been vital to many other developments like cell phones and wi-fi. Radio has shown a great capacity to build community, but unfortunately this community is often of the genocidal kind. The Nazis and the Hutus both used radio to spread hatred of Jews and Tutsis in Germany and Rwanda. Therefore, it seems a little puzzling to me why a work of medium theory and technological modernity would not include Marconi and and the other developers of radio in the mix. I realize that three is a nice number, and it is symmetrical to his analysis of media in terms of Lacan's sacred triangle of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, but radio is vital to the whole wireless phenomenon.

Fibre Optics and Computation

Kittler really flies high here. I really like his examination of fibre optics as a "bottleneck" for information networking, and his insights on Turing's theoretical contributions to the history of the computer are cogent. The notion of the simplest code for mathematical operations, binary code, or base 2, becoming the lingua franca of computation validates the central insight of non-linear mathematics that nigh-infinite complexity can easily be generated by the endless repetition and variation of simple signs. Leibniz, despite being lambasted by Voltaire in Candide for his concept of optimism, has been ultimately validated by his development of binary code. I don't think his optimism has been validated, however. Whoever concludes from simple, thorough observation that we live in the best of all possible worlds is probably sociopathic. Returning to Turing, we can be thankful that he visualized his universal discrete machine as using binary code (hole, absence of hole: signifying 0 and 1) rather than Base 26, which would have approximated the English alphabet!

On a related note, Did ticker tape give birth to the computer?

Kittler's Introduction to Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter

Some Thoughts about Toronto's Architecture

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I have a friend who works at City Hall here in Toronto. He's in the heritage department of urban planning. Being from San Francisco, he often vituperates against the tendency in Toronto to level everything worth preserving in order to erect ticky-tack glass-and-concrete condominiums. While I agree with the spirit of his invectives, I think he goes too far sometimes in lambasting Toronto's architecture.

Granted, Toronto is not a city of architecture on par with Chicago, New York, Berlin, Barcelona or even Dubai. That said, it has experienced a little bit of an architectural renaissance, with exciting projects like the newly reno'd Royal Ontario Museum, the newly reno'd Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Ontario College of Art and Design. While there are some horrible glass obelisks going up, such as the Bay-Adelaide centre, and scads of unremarkable condos, not all of the new projects strike me as worthless.

Take the "L" tower, a residential/mixed use building planned to rise above the Hummingbird Centre, down on front street, for example. Its shape suggests a chair, which in my opinion is a coup of significance over function and decoration, two among several important traits of buildings. The chair is a piece of functional material reality, but one more traditionally associated with indoors. The indoors/outdoors dichotomy of urban space in this building is inverted in the design of a building to suggest the indoors through outward presentation. Plus, the smooth, rounded lines of this proposed building are a relief from the somewhat monotonous perpendicularity of the modern city.

Furthermore, as much as I have ideological problems with the operation of banks, the bank towers of Toronto are laudable simply for the buildings' adherence to each bank's brand design at large. For instance, the Scotia Plaza tower (on the right in the photo) is reddish, evoking the red of Scotiabank's logo. Built of reinforced concrete, with an exterior of red-toned Napoleon Granite, quarried in Sweden, cut and polished in Italy, the Scotia Plaza reaches far into the sky above the old Scotia bank building, the second tallest skyscraper in Canada. The two TD Canada Trust Towers on the left, part of the Brookfield Place office complex, feature windows of a greenish hue, fully consistent with their brand colours of green. Even the grey concrete has a light-greenish hue to it too, especially in bright sunshine. Finally, and perhaps most spectacularly, the Royal Bank Plaza features glass coated in 24 carat gold: almost 1 million dollars worth. Besides the significance of gold as emblematic of monetary wealth, when seen against a blue sky, the building also evokes the colours of the Royal Bank brand: blue and yellow.

A common design detail of all these buildings is steps. This is perhaps the dominant architectural motif in Toronto, and it is echoed in many more buildings than just the ones I've discussed here. It is especially clear in the photo. What is its significance? Perhaps it signifies what it resembles: the stairway. Stairs can symbolize the climbing of the social ladder, or they can visually symbolize the rags-to-riches narratives that abound with regards to large urban centres. As Toronto is Canada's financial capital, this reading rings especially true.

Another motif in Toronto architecture is the juxtaposition of old and new architecture. Examples include the old Scotia Bank building adjacent to Scotia Plaza; the façade of the 1890s-era Merchants' Bank Building in Brookfield Place; the old Stock Exchange façade enveloped by the TD Centre, which was designed by Mies Van Der Rohe; the One King West hotel/condo built on top of the old Dominion Bank Building (1914); and the Michael Lee Crystal, designed by Daniel Libeskind, built into the old Royal Ontario Museum. The old/new hodgepodge creates an eclectic effect that embodies Christopher Dewdney's concept of the metropolis as a gathering of coeval, but distinct, temporalities. Different periods of time coexist in coeval space.

This kind of preservation doesn't seem enough for my friend though. Then, a colleague of mine suggested that perhaps my friend has such a militant attitude towards preservation because he's from San Francisco, a geophysical area regularly rocked by serious earthquakes. As such, the culture of the architectural and urban planning professionals in San Francisco, in which he was immersed for a considerable period of time, might be particularly ardent about preservation considering the dangers to urban structures existing there.

The Uncomfortable Truth

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The Uncomfortable Truth


Precious stigma,
never forgiven.
The smell of fresh grapes gives way
to stale ones
worming around in his mouth
like words, but he feels
no giddiness anymore,
only pain lessened.

He shouts down passers-by with
an uncomfortable vehemence
as pigeons, doing their dance, disperse
in front of his venom:
his paranoid diatribe
urges them into flight
a grey, brown, and cobalt scuttle
that settles once I pass by,
head down,
avoiding eye contact.

And I don’t like what this says about me.

York's Disastrous Public Relations Policy

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By all accounts, the strike at York University has been hard on everyone directly involved, and it has been difficult for the families of those involved as well. As in most crises, however, it has not been equally difficult for everyone. For three months, I have withstood blizzards, minus double-digit degree weather, the stress of witnessing my colleagues physically threatened or attacked, and a steady stream of verbal abuse from a small, vocal group of undergraduates whose knowledge of basic grammar is lamentable. The president and senior administrators have avoided doing their jobs properly while being paid six-figure salaries, preferring instead to bargain through the media. The public relations section of York’s budget is at least twice that of the salaries of the striking workers, who do over 50% of the teaching at York.

Let’s look at the implications of this fact for a minute, and the rationale behind it. York seems to think that spending a vast amount of money on promoting the prestige of a degree from York, while spending as little as 7% of their budget on the overworked underpaid employees doing most of the teaching is a good idea to expand capacity. Well, let’s look at the results. A disgruntled workforce has initiated the longest strike in the post-secondary sector’s history, in Ontario at least. I know at least three extremely intelligent and talented graduate students that have dropped out in the last few months. Enrollments are down in most faculties. Has York’s strategy succeeded? Obviously not.

Like it or not, the public perceives education as the main function of a university, as shown by the tendency of media to emphasize the effects of the strike on undergraduate students. Granted, research is also an important function of our universities. However, considering the popular perception of the primacy of the educational function of universities, perhaps it is a better strategy to give graduate students and contract faculty a better deal and decrease the spending on public relations. As shown by the rapid rise of viral marketing and other forms of word-of-mouth and text-to-text marketing strategies, the field of public relations has changed dramatically. The money York has spent on advertising has basically gone down the toilet because of the resulting word-of-mouth discontent with it as an educational venue. Had the workers been satisfied with their contract, they would have been more prone to speak of York in glowing terms, and their social networks might have lighted up in York’s favour, rather than in their disfavour as the present situation has proved.

The obvious counter argument to this is that York is basing their pay of graduate students and contract faculty on norms for the sector. Maybe York should heed the rhetorical question my mother asked me whenever I told her I was about to do something bad because all the other kids were doing it: if they all jumped off a bridge, would you? Perhaps this strike can serve as a wake-up call for other universities.

Meanwhile, with class-action suits against York pending, where is the accountability? Senior administrators and some undergraduates have asked McGuinty’s government to intervene on their behalf. While I laud the simple act of becoming politically engaged, I think these undergraduates don’t understand the long-term implications of this intervention. Once they finally get their degree and enter the workforce, there looms this dangerous precedent of back-to-work legislation. The long sacred democratic right to negotiate working conditions through collective bargaining will have been forever undermined. Back-to-work legislation is by definition unconstitutional. These students are in effect shooting themselves in the foot in extremely slow motion. The wound will be no less painful when that bullet hits, though. And will the government hold York’s administration accountable? After all, they have massively mismanaged public funds.

I truly regret the negative effects of this strike on not only undergraduate students and my colleagues, but on the members of York’s staff, and the underpaid employees of York Lanes, the retail and service hub of the university, some of whose hours have been cut as a result of decreased business during the strike. The University has lost a lot of money from the decreased parking revenue. Tenured faculty no longer feel proud of their once mighty teaching and research institution. But you know what? I don’t regret going on strike. I know in my heart that my colleagues and I have stood up for justice and equity when no one else would.

The Geo-metrics of Agriculture

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Woof!

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Digital Technology, Memory, and Social Networks

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According to the Torah, God made Adam out of dirt or clay, so according to it humans are, on the most literal level, of the earth. Adam’s descendents have now forged their own neo-Adams out of silicon, the most common element in the earth, and copper. The genesis of artificial intelligence has a longer history than you might suspect. In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the first calculator (mechanical of course), the abacus notwithstanding. It was made of wheels and gears, quite in line with mechanistic views of the universe circulating at the time, and heavily influenced by clockmakers. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, several different large analog and digital computers were developed, especially to decipher codes used in the war. After room-sized computers, came the personal computer in the seventies, which quickly revolutionized everything from business to hand-eye coordination as people started playing video games. The PC took a couple more baby steps that posterity will remember more as a moon walk as it made itself over in the form of the laptop and the palm pilot. In 1973, Canadian Martin Cooper invented the cell phone, which operates through radio waves. As many non-digital technologies digitized (cameras, phones, the walkman), humans stepped into the realm of cyborgdom. The primary or auxiliary function of many of these digital portable devices (DPDs) is memory. With all these gadgets decked out with memories of their own, that moonlight as accoutrements, has the human memory suffered? Or perhaps we shouldn’t be so pessimistic in the formulation of our questions and ask how our memories have changed since the popularization of these devices in globalized culture.

Scholars believe that in the middle ages, because of the generalized lack of literacy (a privilege or a burden, depending on how you look at it, borne by monks in seclusion), cultural memory, and history for that matter, was preserved in verse. Troubadours were the wandering historians, putting oral stories generated by different communities into rhyme and meter. Fast forward to 1875 when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Brantford, Ontario, and made the first call from New York City to Chicago. As this new technology spread like a bushfire during a drought, people started memorizing or simply remembering phone numbers en masse to maintain their social and business networks. The rapid displacement of analog technologies in favour of DPDs has introduced external memory to our personal space. For many of us, this is a relief, as we don’t feel as compelled to perform the sometimes tedious task of memorization. Of course the minute we lose or misplace our cellphone, which also serves as a digital phone book, provided we haven’t transferred this contact list to four different DPDs (a task that is itself tedious and sometimes cluttered with frustration), we are in a serious muddle. A chain reaction of limitations on our actions is imposed on us from without; we feel a loss of agency, and only then do we realize the extent to which we are chained to our DPDs. During such a loss, we can experience a feeling of isolation, a sudden disconnection from our social networks.

While these devices have opened up new avenues for social networking, such as mass emails and online networking tools like facebook, which often reconnects people who’ve lost touch with one another – sometimes contrary to their better intentions – these artifacts of modernity don’t come without their knicker-knotting aspects. Whole new realms of techno-ethics and etiquette are arising, unbeknownst to some. Is there anything more infuriating than hearing a cellphone go off in a movie theatre, for instance? Mind you, it’s easy to forget to turn them off (unless there’s signs posted, in which case, there is no excuse at all), but there are people out there who seem oblivious to the world around them and actually carry on loud, long conversations during a movie, much to the frustration of many movie-goers. Then you have a debate raging over the place of cellphones in schools. As a teacher, I have experienced the frustration of students furtively playing with their cellphones during class. Yet parents assert their right to access their children at all times. This has produced the unexpected effect that children are losing their tenuous sense of independence. Cellphones have also made the possibility of cheating on tests and exams via text message that much more real. The classroom, a site to hone the memory, is not immune to the memory-proof digital commons land of cut and paste. The ease with which information can be looked up on the internet using search engines has made memory retention a somewhat quaint, even an archaic, talent.

There is a catch-22 lurking in the erosion of human memory at the hands of technology. It consists of remembering the ethics and etiquette of emergent technology, which is changing so quickly that it is hard to keep on top of appropriate usages and contexts. The instances of forgetting or simply being unaware of these ethics can serve as agents of social splintering rather than cohesion, generating conflict. The proliferation of mp3 players and musical phones has made the option of aural seclusion available in very public places, which can also result in an exaggerated sense of personal space and a sense of individualism that complicates sociality. While these technologies are touted as the answer to all our networking problems, they have the potential to alienate as much as cohere. Since their popularization, the boundaries between business networks and social networks have been dissolving, and work has found its way into the most private nooks and crannies of our life. We have entered a world of paradox, where our memories have been lulled into inactivity, and where we can cultivate spaces of isolation and yet be held accountable to our places of business as we change our babies’ diapers.

The phone number is practically the blueprint of short-term memory retention; perhaps it is no accident that its basic form is seven digits. Humans have evolved to remember seven items of information (such as a digit) for a span of about 15 seconds. To transfer these bytes of information into the long term memory, we have to work by imprinting them through repetition, translate them into images, acronyms, or use some other trick to remember them over long periods of time. To keep items in the long-term memory, we generally have to periodically retrieve this information to “refresh” it and keep it active. Now that many of us have DPDs, the necessity to memorize phone numbers has diminished. Phone calls are merely a matter of speeddialing or summoning the contact list, finding the right name and number, and pressing dial. It seems to follow that the diminishment of such an important skill in everyday life, the memorization of phone numbers, that keeps our memories active and strong, has the potential to drastically change our consciousness by making forgetting a more determining factor in our lives than remembering. Not only that, but to what degree are the benefits of new technology for social networks counterbalanced by socially divisive knowledge sets that develop between digital haves and have nots?

X-ray Eyes

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Bathysphere

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bathysphere1

bathysphere2

bathysphere3

Bad Writing Example #2

People who write for newspapers have a tough job; they have to meet constant pressing deadlines. A lopsided, lackadaisicle blogger like myself can write at his leisure, with pleasure. That said, some of the mistakes and misprints of newpapers are quite humorous, as those who are very familiar with this blog well know. The piece of writing that I'm about to lampoon is a quote, so I can't fault the journalist for it. It's a quote of a television producer, but it includes a typo that renders its horrendousness hyperbolic.

Here it is:

"The feeling is that historical Canadian history isn't what Canadian audiences want. It's important for Canadians to hear our own stories . . . But for now it's never been harder to do historial drama in this country." Kevin DeWalt, producer of "The Englishman's Boy" (The Canadian Press, Metro News, Monday December 3).

First of all, what the hell is "historical history?" Pleonasm anyone? Generally pleonasm is a rhetorical device used for humour, but something tells me he's not trying to be funny. And if that redundancy wasn't enough for you, you have the misspelled adjective "historial" repeated once more in the last sentence of the quote. Phew!

And now for a history of historical history.

I Love You

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I've had this poem
running around in my gut
for a while.

time, shortened
by needle pricks, waits
for no one

and this poem was
just not ready.

it's about this great
improbable love
i feel for you.

an apple, skin broken,
flesh popping with juice
as teeth joyfully cringe.

an ancient cedar tree,
stuck out of a
limestone cliff face,
something to hold on
to when I fall.

because we all do.

a vase, filling with water,
just before the flowers
sink.

a crocodile's tolerance
of the bird that cleans its teeth.

it hurts to realize how
much i love you.

like a lost meal it hurts.

but it hurts worse to
imagine life without you.

i would have no teeth
for this apple.

News from CUPE 3903 Picket Lines

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CUPE 3903 Strike 2008 Flashpoints.

The media coverage of this strike has been sorely lopsided so far. While the members of the union have taken culture and media production into their own hands, we know that the large audiences are in the hands of the big media corporations. So far, their coverage has been overwhelmingly biased towards the undergraduate student perspective that argues that the union is blockading their education.

On the newsclip that CityTV aired on November 6 on their website, they interviewed three undergraduate students, Union representative Graham Potts, and Alex Bilyck, York Administration’s Public Relations official. They spoke to no union members (or at least, they did not air the members’ viewpoints) whatsoever, aside from Mr. Potts. Of the three undergraduate students interviewed, one supported the strike, and two opposed the strike. The news clip ended with a fourth year business undergraduate lamenting his four year degree possibly lasting slightly more than four years, attempting to leave the audience with an emotionally charged anti-union stance. This attempt seems to have worked, seeing as over fifty percent of people opposed the strike in a three-pronged online poll that measured support, neutrality, and opposition.

In a Toronto Sun article dated November 7th, Alex Bilyck cited the hourly wage of Teaching Assistants as over $60/hr. While those with external/internal funding packages might approach that rate of compensation, this is by no means the norm or even common. To do a good job at teaching, the preparation and marking time often renders the ten hours a week T.A.s are compensated for unrealistic. Overtime payment is available, but it’s littered with a laborious paper trail that renders it prohibitive. According to my contract, I get compensated $29/hr, so the figure he cited is almost twice what I actually make. Furthermore, he said that the 11% wage increase over three years proposed by the union was unrealistic in these difficult economic times. He said that York offered the union 9.25% over three years, but the offer included cuts to benefits and professional development funds that increase the total compensation rate only 2.3%, which is not indexed to the inflation rate of 3.7%. That means in the end that the affected workers will struggle to make ends meet.

His reference to the economic downturn was a purely rhetorical flourish that totally ignores the fact that times of recession are times of boom for universities because people use the time to upgrade their knowledge and skills to be better prepared for subsequent economic upturns. Additionally, Bilyck is not an economist, and he has no expertise when speaking about the effects of the slumping economy on York’s revenues. Furthermore, history has shown us that the knee-jerk reaction of many people to a recession is to stop spending money. If York skimps on our wages, we have less money to spend, and therefore less money to stimulate other sectors of the economy, leading to a further worsening of the depression.

This transferral of blame for the stoppage from the Administration to the Union rings false on two fronts: it is contract faculty and Teaching Assistants who are largely providing the substative intstruction, and the Administration’s unwillingness to negotiate. While tenured professors lecture in halls that hold hundreds of students, substantial chunks of whom are surfing facebook and other unrelated websites, T.A.s and contract faculty deliver instruction in smaller settings, where learning takes place more effectively. This is not to deride the considerable talents of York tenured professors, but facts are facts. Also, the Administration’s offer of binding arbitration “is the University's way of avoiding negotiating with us. Binding arbitration is appropriate when there are one or two sticky issues holding up a settlement NOT when one party has hardly been negotiating at all” (Quoted from an CUPE 3903 email).

The Urban Rebus

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Way to go Obama!

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Good victory speech. Congratulations on your win! I certainly hope that you can be the change that you hope to be.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Artificial Intelligence

Think about it man! Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Artificial Intelligence. I want to get a video feed of that.

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Banal Sublime

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Love Poem

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