Pasek left a newspaper full of rice for the neighbourhood pigeons to peck at. His neighbour, Srinvatti, an East Indian grocer, loathed the pigeons because they shit all over the sidewalk in front of his store. Pasek understood the situation; every time Srinvatti went out and saw the cooing mass, he would swear loudly, and lately he had taken to jumping up and down on the spot and chasing the birds away with a broom.
Pasek felt only the slightest bit of remorse after the first fit that Srinvatti threw, after which he regarded his neighbour’s perturbation with an ironic smile. He didn’t continue feeding the pigeons out of spite; he merely enjoyed the sounds of their cooing close-by as he worked. That, and he was aware that birds often fell dependent on those that fed them, like the geese in the park who stayed the winter when people started feeding them, but died when the feeding sessions were discontinued.
As he went back into the store to do the daily inventory, the familiar swell of bird contentment accompanied him. He heard Srinvatti come out and start cursing his name, knowing that if he went outside right now, Srinvatti would smile his biggest “Hey neighbour, how goes it today?” smile without batting an eyelid.
He heard the invective stop suddenly. A moment later, Srinvatti redoubled his efforts to shoo the birds away with a torrent of oaths and by the swishing he heard, Pasek presumed the broom had been fetched. Pasek firmly strode to his own front door, infuriated with Srinvatti. Srinvatti had done the same thing for years, and it had never gotten under his skin like this before. Now his skin trilled and crawled with indignity. He opened his door abruptly, barely missing Srinvatti's stooped, bulky frame. Srinvatti's loose-fitting red pants swirled around the purple and irridescent vermilion speckled pigeons, erupting higgledy-piggledy in half-flights all around him.
Srinvatti swung around, his body bolt erect, and he stared sullenly at Pasek like a child caught lighting a newspaper on fire.
“Ach, why you always shoo birds away?”
“Dese piles of shit, it drives dee customers away. No one wants to step through bird shit when they’re shopping for nice sound.”
“Well I have store here too, and who could mind such creatures?”
“My customers complain. Customers always right.”
“Why don’t you come tell me you not like me to feed the pigeons?”
The corner of Srinvatti's mouth lifted in an uncertain, barely controlled sneer, but he didn’t answer. Pasek sensed that Srinvatti enjoyed madly sweeping away the small flock on some level. It never occurred to him to tell his neighbour the fondness he had for the birds.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Freud and the Death of Celebrity
Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite. The sheer volume of news dedicated to the deaths of these celebrities would sink the titanic easily. Oh right, the newspaper is dead; everyone gets their news in the immaterial world of the interweb. My laptop weighs like eight pounds. After carrying it around on my back for a year, I stopped because I was getting neck and back pains. Not so immaterial after all, eh? More to the point, what does this recent obsession with not just celebrity, but recently dead celebrity say about our hyper-mediated culture?
Michael Jackson’s death overloaded the internet, stretching its gargantuan bandwidth to the limit. Last week, 5 of the top 5, and 7 of the top 10 selling albums in Toronto were by Michael Jackson. The day he died, at least that many of twitter’s famous trending topics were dedicated to the man, the myth, the legend. The resurgent popularity of Michael Jackson pedophilia jokes aside, the outpouring of grief and love for one of the people who helped shatter the race barrier in popular music was astounding and nigh-impossible to avoid or ignore. I refuse to dispute his importance, or his talent.
Freud might say in one of his casual moments that celebrities are the externalized ideal egos of the masses. We project what we want for ourselves onto these porcelain deities to remind ourselves that our dreams our possible, achievable. Like latter-day Pygmalions, we animate celebrities with our own hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires. After this magic spell is cast, we mimic their style, hoping for a piece of their fame and glamour in our own comparatively drab lives, as the popularity of Farrah Fawcett’s Charlie’s Angels hairdo attests to. When they slip, we revel in their misfortune out of spite, envy, and ultimately because it is not us falling so dramatically. If they recover, we are reminded of the strength of the human spirit, and vicariously it gives us strength for our own personal struggles.
Yet they are not uniformly ideal egos, as the widespread derision of Michael Jackson before he died attests to, excepting of course his hordes of loyal fans. Alas, some of his fans participated in the derision as well. Or consider Brittney Spears, a perfect negative role model; we can comfort ourselves with our paltry little lives because of the deforming effects of celebrity that seem so apparent after tales of her doomed relationship with K-fed and the subsequent custody brouhaha, or after tales of Gary Coleman’s meteoric descent from household imago to security guard. Ideal egos and scapegoats for our own underachievement, perhaps?
The obsession with their deaths can range from cashing in (note the rogue venders hawking Jackson T-shirts in the streets), the will-to-immortalize our ideal egos, or another occasion to celebrate, simple and plain. However, the pre-emption of living celebrities by the dead recently, the eclipse of the vital by the moribund, suggests something a little more sinister. In the death of our ideal ego, do we perhaps recognize a piece of ourselves dying? Michael Jackson died before his comeback; before he died he tried auctioning off some of his belongings to raise money for debts in Las Vegas. The bids for his gloves remained low: $100-$500. Farrah Fawcett died after a excruciating bout of cancer; no comeback lurked around the corner for her. But we still have episodes of Charlie’s Angels on retro tv stations and the Thriller LP continues to pump out Jackson’s sublime falsetto punctuations in clubs and homes. But we have invested these porcelain deities with our displaced humanity, and gone they are. Is this a wake-up call, an invocation of carpe diem, or rather the pathological avoidance of our own mortality through the ongoing immortalization of our ideal egos? Or perhaps it is the death drive usurping the pleasure principle in and through the commodification of celebrity itself, disarticulated from the living and breathing beings that produce it.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Thank You!
Thank you to my readers: the best readers on the internet! It's been a while since I've done this, so let me remind you to click the google ads occasionally. It only takes a few seconds, and gives me a few pennies to compensate me for the work I put into this blog. I would like to salute my readers in Toronto in particular: it is a welcome change that most of my readers are now from the city where I live!
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sunday, June 07, 2009
The Close Call
So there were two people on the hill. A man and a woman. The man looked about ready to grab the woman's arm in a gesture of desire. But the navy blue dress she wore spilled out on the floor like a bloody puddle, and it was the same colour that backgrounded the blue-eyed interrogation room. A dove crashed into the double-sided glass. But the hill was burnt, see. It was burnt to a crisp. It hid all entities in its worm-holes, evacuated. There were people flying acrobatic kites and drawing geometry in the sky. I figure there was already geometry in the sky, but you know, I didn't think about it 'til I seen them kites there. But settle down, I'm tryin' a tell you a story. And all the memories of the people on the hill, they all butted proverbial heads, and all kinds of interference patterns emerged into their shared web of experience. Waves cancel out waves and such.
The desiring man walked down the hill, and if I was there, I might have heard him say to her, and trust, this is what I imagine is consistent with his character, and not what he said, because I wasn't there, after all. He might have said "there's a tree I know in this park; I've seen it once about four years ago when I was here" water splashes out of statuary turtles, into fountains, grace "and this tree is hollow" wind picks up vinyl kite in acceleration followed by upswings in voice volume, flapping "It was eaten out by a fungus, which symbiotically helped it deal better with wind in storms."
Indeed, its leaves were green, but you could crawl right in it. He set out down the bike path snaking down the back of the hill. Twenty minutes later, we smoked a cigarette inside this self-same tree. Almost burned it right down.
The desiring man walked down the hill, and if I was there, I might have heard him say to her, and trust, this is what I imagine is consistent with his character, and not what he said, because I wasn't there, after all. He might have said "there's a tree I know in this park; I've seen it once about four years ago when I was here" water splashes out of statuary turtles, into fountains, grace "and this tree is hollow" wind picks up vinyl kite in acceleration followed by upswings in voice volume, flapping "It was eaten out by a fungus, which symbiotically helped it deal better with wind in storms."
Indeed, its leaves were green, but you could crawl right in it. He set out down the bike path snaking down the back of the hill. Twenty minutes later, we smoked a cigarette inside this self-same tree. Almost burned it right down.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Ontario's Toxin Reduction Act and Blue Green Canada
The United Steelworkers have partnered with the organization Environmental Defence to help initiate Ontario's Toxin Reduction Act, the first of its kind in Canada. The act provides incentives for municipalities looking to reduce their ecological footprints, specifically with regards to sewage, as well as providing lists of safer alternatives to companies that handle toxic chemicals.
As well, the Act requires that businesses employing at least ten people and handling at least 10, 000 kg of specified substances implement stringent measures to track the movement of these substances through the production, and distribution cycle. Companies are asked to come up with pollution prevention programs.
The two organizations have banded together in an initiative called Blue Green Canada, a combination of the previous "blue-collar" jobs with the new "green-collar" sector of the economy. The initiative seeks to create jobs, and both organizations argue that this Act will create green jobs to implement its various measures. They also laud the Act as a good protective measure of human health in the workplace.
While some of the measures instituted by the Act are voluntary, it follows on the heels of similar legislation passed in Massachusetts, which has reported successful results. There is also the potential here for partnerships between Blue Green and the post-secondary sector in order to place recent BSc graduates who might have sufficient expertise in neutralizing the threats of certain toxins or skirting the use of toxic substances altogether. The government could provide further incentives to reduce people's exposure to toxins and mitigate pollution by earmarking research funds for projects that specifically aim to develop non-toxic alternatives to the use of toxins, specifically with regards to chemistry and biology.
This novel initiative shows that unions are heeding the rapid changes in the economy and taking steps not only to protect current workers but to proactively create work, rather than clinging to older models of production.
As well, the Act requires that businesses employing at least ten people and handling at least 10, 000 kg of specified substances implement stringent measures to track the movement of these substances through the production, and distribution cycle. Companies are asked to come up with pollution prevention programs.
The two organizations have banded together in an initiative called Blue Green Canada, a combination of the previous "blue-collar" jobs with the new "green-collar" sector of the economy. The initiative seeks to create jobs, and both organizations argue that this Act will create green jobs to implement its various measures. They also laud the Act as a good protective measure of human health in the workplace.
While some of the measures instituted by the Act are voluntary, it follows on the heels of similar legislation passed in Massachusetts, which has reported successful results. There is also the potential here for partnerships between Blue Green and the post-secondary sector in order to place recent BSc graduates who might have sufficient expertise in neutralizing the threats of certain toxins or skirting the use of toxic substances altogether. The government could provide further incentives to reduce people's exposure to toxins and mitigate pollution by earmarking research funds for projects that specifically aim to develop non-toxic alternatives to the use of toxins, specifically with regards to chemistry and biology.
This novel initiative shows that unions are heeding the rapid changes in the economy and taking steps not only to protect current workers but to proactively create work, rather than clinging to older models of production.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
New Healthy Food Box Program in Montreal
When I was growing up in the small city of Guelph Ontario, I was surrounded by inspiring artists, musicians, and an extremely progressive and innovative environmental activist community. Guelph was one of the first cities to achieve a three-tiered recycling program (wet, dry, non-recyclable) in North America, and it fostered a vibrant organic food movement, especially considering the University there is one of the premiere agricultural science schools in the world. When I was attending University there (for English, mind you, not agro-science), I enrolled in an organic food delivery service that delivered organic, local (when in season) produce to my doorstep. It was, however, fairly expensive. And I was a student, and thus somewhat underfunded. I figured that the extra money was worth it for supporting local farmers and the sustainability aspect of the production.
Guelph, however, is also characterized by a stout middle-class moralism that is unfortunately part and parcel of its counter-culture. Growing up there with a working-class background was not always easy. Class prejudice was, and I suspect still is, alive and well in quixotic Guelph as it is in many cities. That said, I reflected on the food that class marginal people receive through the food bank, to which I admittedly had to resort to survive sometimes. It was usually not of the highest nutritional value, and the produce was especially lackluster. It is fairly common knowledge that pesticides are carcinogenic, and vegetables are essential to a healthy lifestyle. I realized that in the commodity culture that we inhabit the label organic quickly became a marketable commodity with an often inaccessible price tag. I saw the need for some kind of grassroots organization between organic food producers, food banks, and the government (which would hopefully help with subsidization).
I tried to start such an organization that joined the arts community with the organic farming community in 1998. I remember even making preliminary contacts with the folks at the United Way. In hindsight, I think a lack of perseverance and practical skills on my part, combined with a social environment that willfully denied the class implications of poisonous food because of local pride hindered the organization from finding its legs. Perhaps ahead of its time, and out of place, this idea did not fully germinate. My interests shifted, as they often do, and I relegated this venture to the dustbin, slightly discouraged.
Fast forward to the present. An initiative has started in Montreal that addresses these very issues! It is called good food box, and it is being implemented by Moisson, Canada’s largest foodbank, who help to provide food and essential products to 112 000 people in Montreal. It buys produce in bulk from local farmers and distributors, and makes high-quality fruits and vegetables accessible to people in the lower-income brackets. Johanne ThJroux, who is Executive Director of Moisson Montreal, says “Because of the current economic crisis, many families have had to reduce that portion of their budget allotted to food. Families such as these are now able to ensure healthy nutrition through an accessible program which works hand in hand with local farmers in order to offer fresh fruit and vegetables at reduced prices.” But it is about more than food, as Theroux maintains: “Good Food Box therefore offers Montrealers the possibility to break out of their isolation and create community bonds. The program is being developed in Laval and on the South Shore and our objective is to distribute 40 000 boxes in 34 boroughs before 2011.”
People who register for this program are eligible to receive three different sizes of food box, depending on the needs of the family. The large box is $16, the medium box is $10, and the small box is $7. The boxes supply families with 5 daily portions of produce per person for one week according to the standards established by Canada’s Food Guide along with information and recipes for the produce. For more information, visit this website:
This program has been assisted by Centraid of Greater Montreal, the Marcelle and Jean Coutu Foundation, and the Bombardier Aerospace Employee Fund. While it is rewarding to see my vision validated, and to know that Moisson is doing the important work of supplying those in need with healthy food, I think a more aggressive fundraising program could have eliminated the price altogether. Healthy food is a right, and by offering poor quality food for free while simultaneously offering healthy food for a price (no matter how affordable), you put it into the category of privilege
Friday, May 01, 2009
My Tweetfeed @ Pleonasticity
Pleonasticity
- already misses the everyone tab in the right sidebar.
- is eating his words often these days. Luckily at least some of them have nutritional value.
- finds the function of irony on twitter totally multivalent. Difficult to signal.
- Here's the scoop: http://tinyurl.com/dmobna re: Kenyan sex strike.
- @joshstuart I think smitherman should just resign period. He helped McGuinty with the erosion of workers rights re: York strike. #cdnpoli
- is impressed by the ingenuity of Kenyan women re: sex strike to make gov't function.
- lol@msntech. Swine flu goes viral? Well, duh......!!!!
- thinks when politicians think of themselves as something other than media for the execution of their constituents' will, democracy fails.
- is making a deal with the pigs: don't give me the flu, and I won't kill you and eat you.
- Air conditioning is not rocket science. Drill a few damn holes in the ground 100m deep that "share the air" with the basement.
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