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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A cross section of Tweets

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Marathon_JohnI am now convinced running shoe companies are screwing us over by making our feet weak and lazy. Less is more!

HeeBGBz@Phillyberg How about Republicans must wear Asshats at all times. #majoritybitchezBighoodbossA NIGGA BLESSED TO BE HEAR U KNO,6 MONTHS AGO I WAS LAID UP IN THE HOSPITAL SHOT 5 TIMES BUT U SEE I DONE BOUNCED BK!! "HI HATERZ"

siddman"Sometimes good people stay single. For a long time. It sucks, but what’s the alternative?" - Miss... http://tumblr.com/xuz1o71ucktcatJust saw a sign on a women's restroom door that read, "Wet floor." I wondered why you'd want to do that. It seems unhygenic.DavidSerraultThe Information Architect: a complexity strategist?
MTtheGreatBut after all of these experiences, a responsible human being should want some type of growth

Bubbinator3000I can't believe I'm "following" a dog.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Net Neutrality, Democracy, and the Death of the Death of News

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Net Neutrality, Democracy, and the Death of the Death of News

The ailing economy has wrought havoc with media both as a business and as an institution. Every day, year, or even decade seems to bring a new metaphorical death: the death of communism, the end of history, the end of ideology, the death of television, the death of news. If we look closely at what was happening in the media industries in Canada leading up to the recession, we notice two opposing trends that have not been sufficiently reconciled. First there were major mergers of media conglomerates and secondly audiences changed their consumption habits. Many people now use the internet as their main source of news, rather than simply a supplement to their previous news consumption habits.

This has led to decreased advertizing revenues in the hard copy of newspapers, and because services like TiVo allow you to record television, watch it at your convenience, and even to skip the commercials, which is the primary source of revenue for so many media. But many of the world’s most valuable media companies make no money for years, until their cultural capital becomes so concentrated that their value jumps into the stratosphere, Google being the prime example. The Toronto Star recently cut 40 employees from their advertizing sales staff. Why on earth would they do that when advertizing accounts for nearly 80% of their income?

Granted, no one is buying advertizing space in newspapers. Does that mean you cut staff that you could simply retrain to become savvy with various forms of online advertizing? Perhaps it is not so easy. Perhaps your advertizing staff needs to have a whole new, radically different skill set. Rather than person-to-person congeniality and the ability to close, perhaps they need to take some lessons on new media. Or perhaps take some hints from the film and recently the tv industries in order to learn how to use product placement in their content to generate income. Surely, they do this now, what with all the references to blackberries, iPods, and cellphones in news stories. Are the news companies neglecting to actually collect the paycheque for doing it, though? Certainly, this creates some ethical quandaries regarding objectivity and some conflicts of interest as well. The question must, however, be posed. What is more important: the existence of an institution that has long served the public interest by acting as a government and corporate watchdog, or a dogmatic adherence to professional practices that are failing?

Instead of seeing a transgression in the practice of product placement, perhaps news companies should see an opportunity. By conducting investigative journalism to research businesses before soliciting them for product placement in content, news companies can generate content when they encounter questionable business practices, and when they encounter exemplary business practices, they can follow through with product placement with a clean conscience. Killing two birds with one stone, they serve the public interest by exposing shady businesses while simultaneously pursuing promotional revenue.

Far more pernicious than product placement, and for ideological reasons more acceptable, is the increasing concentration of ownership of media. In Canada, monopolies were granted to companies who invested in telecommunications infrastructure because otherwise, such infrastructure would not have been built because of obstacles to achieving the economies of scale necessary to operate such networks. This infrastructure was essential to nation-building*. However, the phenomenon of convergence has for all intents and purposes eviscerated diversity in the news. Now, rather than hire trained professionals to produce news content, reformatting has become pivotal. CTVGlobeMedia, which owns a newspaper, a bunch of television stations, some publishing companies, some radio stations, and a large share of one of the most profitable content franchises in television (CSI), now hires reformatters to simply reorganize news data to fit in another medium. In other words, a reformatter will take a news story from a television news show and repackage it for distribution in a newspaper, all owned by the same parent company. Amongst all the discourse about the democratization of content production heralded by the internet, the fact remains that those that benefit materially, that is, earn an income from such production, remain in a minority. Indeed, many even pay to produce and distribute such content. So concurrent with increasing audience fragmentation brought about by the 500 channel television spectrum, blogging, et cetera, there is the elimination of diversity in the “official” news industry. This dynamic is one of the central paradoxes of contemporary communications, and it is at the source of this “crisis” of media.

Furthermore, the partnerships forming between internet service providers and big players on the internet that supply content platforms has rendered the dangerous and inherently undemocratic practice of streamlining web traffic to major web sites. In other words, the huge internet companies such as yahoo, AOL, MSN etc. are trying to broker deals with ISPs that would render the speeds of data transfer on their sites much higher than that of smaller sites. If such deals come to pass, all this celebration of the inherently democratic character of the internet is for naught, and moreover, it is even outright deceptive and manipulative. This is where government needs to intervene to prevent such deals from happening, deals that would have a cumulative effect of bottlenecking internet traffic through the busiest hubs, thereby concentrating wealth, knowledge, perspectives.

For example, imagine you are trying to find independent perspectives on Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Should such aforementioned deals between ISPs and internet conglomerates go down, an NGO site that has relatively independent information on the war would load slowly. You would become frustrated and move on. As we all know from experience, no matter how fast things get, unless you have the latest equipment, they never seem fast enough. There is nothing more irritating than watching the data transfer bar in the lower right hand corner of your screen crawling to the right. When you move on, you come upon news on the msn platform that loads instantaneously. Perhaps msn has a deal to develop informational networks in Afghanistan. They have a vested interest in certain portrayals. Hence, because of such deals, the objectivity of news would come under direct attack. The concept of net neutrality, which advocates equal speeds for all websites and critiques the attempted deals between internet content platforms and service providers, is one of the most salient issues in communications today. Pressure needs to be applied to governments to protect the internet from manipulative practices such as these, as they inherently endanger the very democratic elements of the internet that people sing from the rooftops.

* the portion of this article about telecommunications monopolies in Canada granted for the sake of nation-building was taken from Lectures by Professor David Skinner in his Introductions to Communications course at York University

Saturday, March 21, 2009

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.



Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

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
  • Saturday, February 14, 2009

    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.


    Tuesday, February 10, 2009

    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.

    Wednesday, January 28, 2009

    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.

    Friday, January 09, 2009

    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?

    Monday, December 01, 2008

    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.

    Wednesday, November 19, 2008

    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.

    Wednesday, November 12, 2008

    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).

    Wednesday, November 05, 2008

    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.


    Monday, November 03, 2008

    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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    Wednesday, October 15, 2008

    Canada and the proverbial head up the ass

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    Why is the Canadian public so enamored with mediocrity? After last night’s election results, I have been forced to return to this painfully recurring idea.

    First of all, the election produced the lowest turnouts in the history of the country: less than 60% of the eligible voters voted. I guess mediocrity moves in a top-down direction. It spills out from the government and infects the public. If you don’t vote, you don’t deserve to live in a democracy. It’s that simple. So all you non-voters: do the rest of us a favour and move to Zimbabwe. Work is no excuse. There are laws that protect your right to vote. Your employer must give you three consecutive hours when polling stations are open to vote. I’m starting to be attracted to some rather ugly political alternatives because the voting public seems to have its head shoved so far up its ass, it can’t tell whether it’s night or day.

    Second of all, how on earth, could you re-elect someone who just frittered away 300 million dollars in difficult economic times to hold an election, the results of which do not substantively change the political situation? Ok, the Bloc lost power in Quebec. The NDP gained seats (a minor victory, but not enough a glimmer of hope to overcome the pessimism ruling my typing fingers right now), and the Conservatives managed to make inroads in Ontario and B.C. and managed to “naturalize” their rule in Canada. Ugh. Gag me with a chainsaw. Seriously, though, the man even broke a parliamentry law he made to call the election too!

    Third, it is the very policies that the Conservatives espouse that resulted in the credit crisis. The ideology of greed behind corporate tax cuts is the same ideology of greed that leads people to falsely inflate stock values, which in turn leads to economic crises. They rationalize corporate tax cuts by saying it creates jobs, it stimulates investments. Then why has almost every government that cut corporate taxes incurred a deficit? People lie; history doesn’t. Wake up and smell the history books people! Furthermore, we need more government control of pricing. There are too many people charging far too much for certain goods and services. This would create jobs in the government sector. It would also prevent people from spending too much money on goods they’re being overcharged for, leading to the need to borrow money, which in turns leads to banks lending money they don’t have, another cause of the recent credit crunch.

    Lastly, what is the deal with immigrants voting Conservative? Stephen Harper has changed immigration so that it’s more difficult to get in the country than previously. Ask my friend’s husband, who is in Mexico because he can’t get a green card to come to Canada. He’ll tell you all about it. You’re voting and collaborating with a man who didn’t want you here in the first place!

    Thursday, September 25, 2008

    New Tactics of The Invisible Truth. A Laboratory of Poetry and News.

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    So I've been messing around with my blog here, and I've attached an RSS feed, so you can now subscribe to my dazzling posts! I've also arranged to mail ten friends whenever I update my blog, so if any of you mind, then let me know, and I'll take you out of the mix. Information saturation is no joke! I've started embedding links in some of the posts as well, so if you see a word underlined, then that's why!

    I've been experimenting a bit with writing poetry about specific trails I follow through the internet, but I've found formatting them a bit of a challenge. Therefore, I haven't posted any of these experiments. If you click the title of this post, it will take you to a site with people who are doing very interesting things with the intersection between the art of film and the art of poetry.

    Also, I highly recommend checking out www.blublu.org, and click on the MUTO video link. Absolutely amazing video art. It is one of two videos that really overcame my inherent prejudice against video (even though I occasionally dabble in it too, as you can see). By dabble, I mean use short (less the 30s) clips shot with a mid-range digital camera, edit them together, and add music that I composed to the soundtrack, although one of the other videos in my archive included other artists in the soundtrack.

    That's all for now! Until next time my friends!

    The Growing Light

    Tuesday, September 09, 2008

    Why "Greening" is good for the Economy

    Dear Lorne Gunter:

    At first, let me pre-emptively forgive you for being named Lorne. I have a certain amount of sympathy for anyone who shares a name with Mr. Green, of some eighties wilderness show fame, you know, the show where they did terrible things to animals in order to make them do exciting things for the cameras. See, the show's name is so memorable I've forgotten it.

    But really, in your article "Dion Ex Machina," in The National Post you make the translation "God in the machinery" for the literary device deus ex machina. Where'd you get your degree in literature? Phoenix University? I thought so. It's "God out of the machine," you idiot. I know you've been reading wikipedia lots lately, and you seem to have read the first paragraphs in wikipedia's article about neoclassical grievances with the device as a crutch for an intractable plot problem. But you neglected to consider the effectiveness of the device as used in enduring classics of the theatre, such as oh, say, Euripedes' Medea, which has survived, and been studied and loved since 431 B.C.; The Illiad, one of the cornerstones of Western snivelization; and good ole Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.

    I bet you thought you were clever when you applied this literary device to Stephane Dion's plan to reduce our carbon footprint. It's good that you demanded concrete details. It's bad you think "greening" is just going to cost money, and not generate oodles of wealth. Most economists I know predict that the next booming sector of the economy is the green sector, and they seem sure that it will match or surpass the dotcom boom of the late nineties. Moreover, all those coal-producing and gas burning and nuclear generating technologies you say are already entrenched will cost us far more in the long run than switching to green technologies. What was the cost of Hurricane Katrina again? Oh yeah, don't listen to the majority of scientists who link the greenhouse effect with such storms, they're stupid, right? Duh! Get with the program Mr. Gunter. Green technologies generate wealth; they don't just cost money.

    Sunday, September 07, 2008

    Lunch with the Furies

    I finished Salman Rushdie’s book Fury a couple weeks ago. I think living in America has ruined one of the greatest writers of our time. Fatwas, the occasional newspaper article aside, Rushdie has fallen into a creative abyss. Sure he can play with language, sure he can wax poetic, but as many have told me, that doesn’t necessarily make for a good novel. It was full of insight about modernity, including a knowing wink at certain postmodern philosophers like Baudrillard but ultimately it failed as a novel.

    It lacked a strong story, seeming more like a character study of a retired academic cum a world-famous doll maker. It riffs on the anger simmering below the surface of everyday interactions, but it never moves beyond glibness. In this, it reminded me of Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul. The occasional philisophico-poetic reverie falls flat for a lack of a strong framework to hold it in both books.

    There is mystery: is the narrator the mysterious concrete killer who has been serially murdering the women of economic illuminati families, or is it his self-loathing African-American friend Jack? But unfortunately Rushdie failed to make me care that much. This book is eminently readable, but its fragmentation comes off as more lazy than intentional. The narrator is not necessarily fully likeable, which is ok, but his transformation is accomplished through a corny love story, no matter how unusual the pairing.

    Wednesday, August 20, 2008

    A Poem inspired by the film "The Visitor"

    Love is something that happens
    to someone else.
    Until it happens.
    In which case we’re all involved.
    The case in which we carry
    our wounds –
    scabs inside, fresh pus, blood,
    plasma without –
    breaks the moment we let
    love inside
    breathe.

    Let love breathe, I say.
    If it founder in impossibility,
    it shows us how to try anyway
    so our imps
    of base feelings ossify
    and only their scars remain.

    Briefly, papers fall out of the case
    creased, scattering in the wind.

    You can chase them.

    But if you catch one, look at it closely.

    Words, bloodied and paled
    on pages too barren for speech.

    Signs, showing you the way
    to forget. To fulfil promises
    without remembering them.


    Thursday, August 07, 2008

    An Homage to India

    I have received an increasing number of readers from South Asia. I have long since received hits from Korea, mostly because of my stint of teaching English there. But an increasing number of people in India are visiting my website, and for that I thank them. This is a dedication to my Indian readers, especially those who may or may not be affiliated with the 50 million-strong Communist Party in India.

    Please bookmark this page and come back often. I update it about once a week. Also, as usual, I ask that you please visit the sponsors listed at the top and bottom of the page. I put a lot of work into this blog, and these advertisements are a way to get reimbursed (however slightly) for this work. It really doesn't take that much time...

    Thank you all.

    Friday, August 01, 2008

    One Line Missing

    It's quiet nights like this, as bumptious
    blue lights flicker across curtains suggesting
    northern lights, on streets of narrow houses in a row,
    with wind disappearing and the smell of sewers
    weaving up into air above steel grates; it's quiet
    nights like this that remind me of those evenings
    of boredom on endless couches in front of televisions,
    when hands slip into your
    boxer shorts, bedspread allocating
    a radius of warmth difficult to resist, and fingers find
    the damp curvatures of desire,
    torsos wasting away, growing alongside mould
    in tv dinner packaging
    cluttering the surface of a chestnut coffee table,
    under the natter of roommates upstairs gossiping.

    Turning on to Bloor, full of drunken celebrants
    giggling, arms linked, lights glinting off passing cars,
    I avoid the eyes of passers-by, and keep focussed.
    This has to be done. It has to end.

    Words string themselves together to make sense
    of mental decay, of the lead weights attached to our
    ankles, attached to each other, fixtures
    on each other's walls, sconces hiding burnt-
    out light bulbs, words that fill the silence
    in which lives the fear that you will be relieved

    by the cut line.

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    Competitive Salary!

    So the Goodwill on Roncesvalles is hiring. They are offering a competitive salary. Competitive with what? How on earth can a salary be competitive? Ok, got it. It's the company that is competing with other companies. Right, they're just copying this grammatical idiocy from everyone else. Shouldn't blame them, right? Gotta beat that Sally Anne, you know. For those of you just hopping aboard the S.S. thrift shop, Sally Anne is the Salvation Army. Cuz your soul is in jeopardy, you know, and the poor are mostly fools.

    Who really cares if your salary is competitive? The Indiana Pacers are competitive, but they suck. They round out the bottom of the NBA on a regular basis. My question to you, Goodwill, is are you winning? It's a battle for souls out there, and is your will good enough to hunt the top prize? Are you ready to round out your days with right hooks to your St. Vincent de Paul neighbours?