tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-385604812024-03-07T10:56:34.164-05:00The TranscontinentalAndrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.comBlogger350125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-29046060713485664332023-10-11T10:54:00.003-04:002023-10-11T10:54:41.849-04:00On liking bad things<p>When I was a kid, I collected comic books. This was back in the 80s, before the Tim Burton Batman movie turned "comics" into something else, into movies, I suppose.</p><p>I was obsessed with comics, and my best friend at the time was my best friend in large part because he was the other kid who was really into comic books (there were other common interests but for the sake of anonymity I'll leave those out). </p><p>I stopped collecting comics in the early 90s for a very straightforward reason- I got a girlfriend. It was that simple. I went from spending all my money on comics to never buying one for years. I was done with them and I never really looked back. </p><p>Well, that's not really true, or else I wouldn't be writing about them now. More like, every few years I would go to a comic book store, sometimes one I'd frequented in the past, where the owner would remember me with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment, and I'd pick up an issue of what had been my favourite comic book, the Fantastic Four. I'd read the issue I bought, mostly confused because I'd lost all the plot threads. And was never so taken by whatever I read I sought out older issues to better understand what was going on. This was probably a sign.<br /></p><p>I still have my comic books, or, my parents do. They sit in a pile of white boxes in a storage room in their basement, and we talk a lot about them sending these eight boxes to me, the final repatriation of stuff that has been sitting at my parents' house in the quarter century since I left Calgary.</p><p>After the birth of my first son, I started to indulge again in some of my youthful interests more than I did in that liminal space between childhood and parenthood. As an example, over the years, I've bought some of the omnibus editions of the Fantastic Four, big thick volumes that collect 30 issues in a hardbound dust jacketed "prestige" edition. I've usually bought them on sale at BMV, a local second hand bookstore here in Toronto, while also somewhat inebriated, alcohol being the royal road to nostalgia.</p><p>I've had them for years, but it was only a few weeks ago that I started to read the first one, which collects the first 30 issues of the Fantastic Four, "The World's Greatest Comic Book Magazine". I'm reading them mainly because I'm sleep deprived as a result of the birth of my second son, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read, say, Wieland's<i> Des Esels Schatten</i> at night, or anything else that's a) in a language other than English or b) more involved or complicated than a magazine article.</p><p>As I've been making my way through the omnibus, an issue or two per night, a thought kept creeping in, one that was there the last time I read some of these treasured stories about a decade ago - they aren't very good. The stories, the art, they aren't very good.<br /></p><p>Maybe it was pride, or nostalgia (it was nostalgia) that kept the thought at bay, but yesterday I happened to read an essay by Sam Kriss <a href="https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead">about the death of nerds</a>. As someone who used to try to talk about hipsters on this very blog, to try to figure them out, I'd never really thought about the fact that nerds really did take over. </p><p>And the idea, which I'm taking from Kriss' essay, that hipsters were just
snobs except in the wrong direction, seems correct, in part because I
talked about<a href="https://the-transcontinental.blogspot.com/2009/08/some-notes-around-west-queen-west.html"> this myself</a> 14 years ago! So I think he's right about how the hipster and the nerd have functioned in our culture, and how we do seem to be moving past them.</p><p>For my own part, I never considered myself a nerd (I'm sure everyone else did!) but in my defense, I'd always been a pretty bad nerd - for one, although I was obsessed with comic books, and collected them with a verve bordering on what we'd probably call OCD now, I really did enjoy them. I really liked the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, and all the other superheroes - I liked their adventures, and had a lot of fun reading them and talking about the latest issues with my friends. </p><p>But then I grew up.<br /></p><p>To be sure, when I was in junior high, my friends and I would discuss the literary merits of comic books, their aesthetic value of course on a par with the great works of Shakespeare and Beckett, but given none of us had read any literature at that stage, it seems like in hindsight, what we were doing was learning to perform the Anglo-American-Canadian culture two step, where we affirm that whatever mass media product we're slurping down at the time is just as good as anything that has a higher aesthetic value - snobs are really just nerds with ascots! </p><p></p><p>But back to me. I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped reading comic books around the same time I got into classical music - the girlfriend was definitely the last straw, but the signs were there. The last year I bought comics as a teenager, it was more out of a sense of duty- I wasn't reading them, I was collecting them, but the love wasn't really there anymore.<br /></p><p>What did I love instead? Bach. And Monteverdi. And so on. </p><p>***</p><p>All this being said, I don't want to pretend I spend all my time listening to Xenakis on a $10,000 soundsystem while reclining in a late 60s Finnish recliner. For one, I like Star Wars, and I dutifully watch all the shows and movies, and I've even bought some of the novels and comic books. Most of them aren't very good, and it feels a lot like Kriss' description of nerdery, where I'm really consuming it because it's not great, but Star Wars has always held a particular place in my head, and even though I sometimes resent it, it doesn't really matter. </p><p>It's more like a sickness, in the way that Goethe and Heine described Romanticism as a sickness. It's something I have, and deal with, but it's not going away, and you have to treat it. But pretending like it isn't a sickness is as good an explanation as any as to why so much mass culture sucks so badly, where you have so many smart, creative people turning out bland slop to audiences who don't even know if they care about this stuff anymore.</p><p>Have I just spent a morning writing a blog post on how I'm not really a nerd? Yes, I think so. But I'd also like to start talking about taste again, maybe in a slightly more philosophical way, and this seemed like a good place to start. </p><p>Soon I'll start talking about Heinrich Heine's thoughts on taste, but not today. </p><p>But soon.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-56573603868495582102023-09-01T09:00:00.001-04:002023-09-01T09:00:00.134-04:00Post Beer<p>According to my Blogger account, I had intended to write a post about the unstoppable rise of overhopped beer almost a decade ago, in September of 2013. </p><p>For some reason, I never got to it, but now's good time to talk about this trend just as it seems to be dying out. The winds have changed, and what would have been a prescient 2013 post will now just be me trying to keep some kind of momentum going on this blog!</p><p>*** <br /></p><p>Way back in 2010, <a href="http://the-transcontinental.blogspot.com/2010/08/bildung-i.html" target="_blank">I went to Germany</a> for the first time in a long time. It was a pretty difficult time in my life, but I had a great time in Göttingen, and was very fortunate that I was able to return to Germany for months on end during the subsequent summers.</p><p>It was here that I discovered that I really liked German beer. That is, I really liked lagers - I also liked wheat beers, but there is something wonderful about German lagers, and how I could drink so very very much of it and feel fine the next day, in a way that I'd never experienced in Canada.</p><p>I'll never forget the day I returned to Toronto, and went out to a local (unfortunately long gone) pub near my apartment with my parents and then young son. I ordered a Steamwhistle, which advertised itself as a pilsner and which up to that very moment, was a beer I quite liked.</p><p>As I took that first sip, I was taken aback by its sweetness and, for lack of a better way of saying this, how difficult it was to just knock it back. It's not a terrible beer, but it's no pilsner!<br /></p><p>As I recently pointed out implicitly <a href="http://the-transcontinental.blogspot.com/2023/05/knowing-carbonara.html" target="_blank">on this very blog</a>, Canadians can be uh, parochial. Even in a big city like Toronto, there's a long-standing tolerance for mediocrity that I've always found really strange, especially when we have access to so many great cuisines and people with the cultural knowledge to prepare things well. People here have always seemed to equate paying a lot of money in a cool place to eat or drink something with eating or drinking something good.</p><p>Although my taste buds readjusted to the sweeter Canadian beers, what didn't change was my emerging hostility to hoppy ales. Which is why <a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/ball_1_1_11/">this article</a> by Rick Ball in Guernica magazine spoke to me, although not enough to write about it at the time! <br /></p><p>I'd encourage you to read it, but the short version is that the reason we were (and are still) awash in overhopped IPA is because they're easier to make, and what started as a kind of reaction to bland corporate beer, became the many headed hydra of going out and watching people pretend that something that tasted like floor cleaner was actually delightfully refreshing.<br />
<br />
Even at the time, articles like <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/2013/05/hoppy_beer_is_awful_or_at_least_its_bitterness_is_ruining_craft_beer_s_reputation.html">Hoppy Beer is Awful</a> were sounding the alarm bells, even if it was with the-then necessary cultural proviso that she also liked these terrible beers, they were just getting too hoppy.</p><p>Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend for me was the opening of <a href="https://bellwoodsbrewery.com/" target="_blank">Bellwoods Brewery</a> in my old neighbourhood. It checked all the boxes - it had this "authentic" vibe while simultaneously being very expensive, and advertising how local and "authentic" it was, while clearly the result of a large amount of capital. </p><p>Nevertheless, everyone was raving about them so I thought I'd give them a try, and their beer was awful. I don't say this lightly - at the time I didn't really like IPAs but I could stomach them, but they had this one IPA with blood orange that was literally stomach turning. </p><p>Now to be fair to them, they've pivoted away from the hoppy beers to the sour ones. But at the time, I was genuinely perplexed to see the volume of people walking past my apartment carrying their smartly branded bottles. Did they really enjoy these beers? Or were they just chasing trends?</p><p>Why did I care about this so much? Probably because I drank a lot and so beer was on my mind! Now, I feel so distant from beer culture that I don't even really know what's popular anymore. What I do know is that a lot of breweries, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the easy-to-make IPA crowd, started trying to make nice German lagers again, and one can indeed find some good local beers that I don't want to use as a stain remover.</p><p>That being said, most bars and brewpubs here in Toronto at least are still extremely over saturated with IPAs, but at least now there's a small chance that there will be something I would like to drink, if I were to drink at all!<br /></p><p>Even Bellwoods seems to have moved on - their most popular beer now is <a href="https://www.blogto.com/restaurants/bellwoods-brewery-toronto/" target="_blank">a sour</a>, which again, coming from Germany, is something that both amuses me a depresses me! But the story of trying to get a glass of Berliner Weisse with syrup in Toronto is a story for another day! <br /></p>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-65161795778836672052023-08-30T10:05:00.005-04:002023-08-30T10:05:29.011-04:00Reverend Billy<p>This morning, on the way home from walking my dog, I kicked a plastic Starbucks coffee/frappuccino/iced latte/whatever cup that someone had decided was better to leave on the ground instead of putting it into the nearby garbage container...who am I to judge?</p><p>Anyway, kicking it had a Proustian effect on me, because I immediately thought about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverend_Billy_and_the_Church_of_Stop_Shopping" target="_blank">Reverend Billy</a>, someone I haven't thought about in nearly 20 years. Specifically, I recalled the photo that accompanied this <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/reverend-billy-s-unholy-war.html" target="_blank">2004 profile of him</a> in the New York Times (unfortunately archived article lacks the photo!), which depicted Reverend Billy being held back by some random Starbucks patron. </p><p>In my mind, the patron has the dead expression of a dad holding an unruly toddler, keeping Reverend Billy in place until the authorities could arrive and the patron could get his 2000 calorie Moccaccino with extra whipped topping or whatever it was he was protecting from the Reverend's anti-consumerist predations. </p><p>I can't find the image anywhere online, so you'll just have to trust me, but it's evocative of a time when culture jamming was still a thing and the "average" person thought that it was more important to protect Starbucks than to let the performance artist play out his show. </p><p>Times have changed, and come to think of it, I think if Reverend Billy went into a Starbucks now, he'd be greeted with applause instead of concern. In other words, he'd probably get co-opted in that special way that capitalism manages to do to everything and everyone.<br /></p><p>So it good to know that Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping have moved on somewhat from their anti-consumerist bent (haven't we all?) and onto other pressing matters, like recently writing about <a href="https://indypendent.org/2023/08/reverend-billys-revelations-23/">global warming</a> and protesting <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/4/23/protesters-sing-honeybeelujahs-robobees/">robobees.</a> In other words, he's still fighting the good fight.<br /></p><p></p><p>Although I haven't thought of him in decades, I'm glad he's still around. Who knew kicking a trash on a Toronto street this brisk late summer morning would lead to reacquainting myself (and you, my dear reader) with something good?<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-51005628519798871362023-08-29T15:05:00.005-04:002023-09-29T11:00:27.232-04:00Punching down <p>I wouldn't really be back to blogging if I didn't complain about something that I saw on the Internet a while ago. </p><p>Even better, I'll be complaining about someone's take on classical music!</p><p>Today's blog post responds to a tweet thread about a subscriber-only New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/opinion/musicology-racism.html?smid=tw-share">piece</a> by John McWhorter that's a review of a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Making-Welcoming-Everyone-Justice/dp/047205502X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8">book</a> by Philip Ewell about racism in musicology.</p><p>Here is the tweet in question - at least most of them! <br /></p><p></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">I mean the real answer is “fine” art was conceived as part of a racial and colonial and gendered project to figure out how society could contain free self-governing subjects who miraculously all arrived at the same universal laws independently</p>— Robin James (@doctaj) <a href="https://twitter.com/doctaj/status/1659018902272131072?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 18, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"></blockquote><p>The tweet is from a musicologist named Robin James - she has a <a href="https://www.its-her-factory.com/">blog</a> too! </p><p>When I read these, my initial reaction was to be angry. Because that's what one does when they're on Twitter. </p><p>But the more I've thought about it (and I give these kinds of things far too much thought) the more it just makes me depressed and sad. Sad about the state of arts and humanities academia, but also sad about the ways in which most people, even smart people, talk about something that's very important and vital to me - classical music.</p><p>*** <br /></p><p>Now if you're actually reading this, or you've read me before, you'll know that these tweets are the kind of thing that's preoccupied me for a long time, because they're about the "discourse" of classical music.<br /></p><p>I think there's a lot going on in this tweet, which is part of a longer thread - beyond the "classical music is white supremacist" stuff, she thinks that Socrates had it coming, which I'll admit I found pretty funny even if I think that's an idiosyncratic take on his death! </p><p>At the heart of them is an age old battle, one that's been going on for maybe 100 years. You know the one, right? Or is it just me? It's probably just me.</p><p>I've explained this before, so I'll try to be brief - the popular music industry has long used "classical" music as a foil to sell records. If that's the materialist base, the cultural byproduct of this dialectical relationship between popular and "art" music is that a lot of people (and I've known a lot of people like this!) who like popular music simultaneously see classical music as some kind of threat. <br /></p><p>This takes all kinds of forms - you have the stuffiness of the concert hall as opposed to the authentic freedom of a rock concert. There's the obvious conservatism of the classical musician compared to the progressive vision of the punk or new wave artist. Or maybe it's just a generic defensiveness that I've encountered all too often when I tell people I like listening to Josquin or Wagner, as though I'm judging people for their musical tastes simply by expressing my own tastes.<br /></p><p>This is a very common rhetorical move in popular discourse around classical music, and the move is persistent mainly because it's very effective! </p><p>It's what the CBC did back in the aughts to gut classical music on the radio, and fire a bunch of orchestral musicians (which I discussed back in the day) - they argued that in was unfair that classical music got so much airtime as opposed to popular music on CBC. </p><p>And of course, they were right! Classical music did get a lot of airtime on CBC radio, but literally nowhere else on the radio! If you wanted to listen to all kinds of independent "popular" artists or huge acts, you had a lot of places to listen to them, but if you wanted to hear Calgary Opera's production of some new Canadian opera, CBC Radio Two was it.</p><p>So fast forward to 2023, and the newest version of this phenomenon is something like this:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="333" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kr3quGh7pJA" width="400" youtube-src-id="Kr3quGh7pJA"></iframe></div> <p></p><p>I'll admit, this video kind of broke my brain when I first encountered it. I thought about doing a post on it, but it's too demoralizing and this video is too old at this stage, and frankly too popular, to bother.<br /></p><p>That being said, the idea that the music theory that one is taught if they go to university to study western classical music has some kind of empirical claim to universality is absurd to me.</p><p>I studied music at university, and took years of theory, counterpoint and orchestration. I still have my theory textbooks, so after watching this video I went and checked them out, and right there at the start, they all say they're going to teach you about the harmonic and contrapuntal practices of European music from around the late 17th Century to the present. </p><p>They never say that this is the only way to conceive of music theory, or that this is the best way of doing music theory, or whatever. The textbook does what it says on the tin - it shows you the kinds of musical organization that one saw in the music of Bach and those who followed in his footsteps.</p><p>Do North American universities privilege "classical" music education over popular music? Yes, at least this was the case back in the day. Is this the result of long-standing legacies of colonialism and racism in North America? Yes, it seems likely, given the settlement patterns of the continent! Does this mean that classical music, as in, a particular genre of music whose genealogy predates colonialism, is essentially white supremacist? Uh...</p><p>If I'm being charitable, Jame's tweet above is pretty narrow in scope. She's suggesting that the idea of "fine" art is a kind of political project that cashes out in favour of western ideas as being universal. But there are a lot of problems with this - when does this "project" actually start? </p><p>For example, was Beethoven, when he was adopting Schiller's text about all men being brothers, in fact suggesting that the idea of universal brotherhood relied on western subjectivity, and not say, wishing for the possibility of human solidarity across race and culture? One of these readings seems charitable and plausible, and the other one seems like the reading that will get you a SSHRC here in Canada (zing!). <br /></p><p>This tweet strikes me as part of this defensiveness I've been describing taken to a whole new level - did someone say classical music is better than pop music? Well, classical music isn't just stuffy or irrelevant or out of touch, it's actually harming people, and also, please buy my rock album and read my scholarship.</p><p>That seems like a very bold and nonsensical move to make, especially for
someone like James. She's a philosopher, but there's a pretty clear
hole in this argument - the suggestion that the people who made the art
somehow impacts the aesthetic value of the art is just the good old
intentional fallacy.</p><p>If this all seems mean, it kind of is, and I don't doubt that her response comes from a place of justified anger about McWhorter's piece - I'm going to go ahead and admit that I haven't read it because I don't have a NY Times subscription, but his tweets on it are not great - conflating musicology and music theory doesn't really cover him in glory. </p><p>That being said, if I'm being charitable, I can see that the point he's getting at is just that making these kinds of essentialist claims about an academic discipline leads us to dark places - I should know - I'm a Germanist!</p><p>But it's a pretty easy move, in a dying academic profession, to take something like classical music, which gets scholarly attention for historical
reasons and declare it to be so bad, so evil, that it should be wiped
off the face of the earth, so that popular music scholars can get
tenure instead. <br /></p><p>I don't want to psychologize Robin James too much, but she definitely reads, in her tweets and in her blog, like someone who really does think that rock music is the music of protest, while Marxists like Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze were, I don't know, white supremacists, because of the kind of music they produced. As in, it wasn't their political affiliations that mattered, but what she considers the problematic genealogy of their music that renders their art as reactionary or racist. I think this is deeply, deeply wrong. </p><p>Unfortunately, it's typical of online discourse to see people punch down while acting as though they're punching up. Does Robin James really believe that classical music has any cultural power at this stage? Would anyone who isn't trying to raise funds for an orchestra or an opera company say that it does?</p><p></p><p>I don't know Robin James. She might be a very nice person, and an excellent scholar, and I suspect that if we had a beer together, we'd probably be a lot closer politically than apart. But as someone who is himself recently out of the academy, I have encountered a lot of people who put on this kind of performance, who talk in this way, and I just don't understand how they fail to see that all they're doing is tearing apart their own academic disciplines in an attempt to "rescue" them.<br /></p><p>It's not a solution to the "problem" of the arts or the humanities in the academy - it's just doing the work of the neoliberal ghouls who've destroyed pretty much all of culture, including higher education. But make no mistake - once they get rid of all those overpriced classical music programs, they're coming for everyone else. <br /></p><p>I think it would be better if people did work of all kinds in well-funded public universities that accommodate the histories and theories of many musical genres . I think robust public radio and television and internet that supports the huge diversity of musical styles and histories would work well for everyone. </p><p>I think almost anything would work better than watching people tear each other down in the service of capital on a dying social media platform would be better, but often it seems like this is all we have left.</p><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-35792927609870944652023-05-29T11:15:00.005-04:002023-08-29T15:10:21.406-04:00Knowing Carbonara <p>Like many people who only write on their blog every few years, I probably spend too much time consuming more modern forms of online content. </p><p>Despite the algorithmic focus of today's internet, YouTube in particular occasionally suggests stuff to me that satisfies a "need" I didn't know I had. In this case, it's been suggesting various "science" YouTubers to me, and I found myself enjoying this video in particular about physics crackpots:</p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="332" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/11lPhMSulSU" width="399" youtube-src-id="11lPhMSulSU"></iframe></div> <p></p><p>The gist of the video is that physicists get a lot of e-mails from people who've claimed to have "solved" some problem in physics, or that physics as it's currently understood is wrong. She mentions that a lot of these cranks are retired engineers, and having written correspondence for senior public officials over the years, I can attest to the fact that engineers have a strange propensity for attempting to "solve" some problem in a way they'd build a bridge, but without say, knowing anything about bridge building. It's funny because it's true! <br /></p><p>What does this have to do with spaghetti carbonara? Well, about halfway into the video, the host uses an analogy about crackpots where she compares receiving these e-mails to someone coming into a professional kitchen and telling the chef that they're doing food incorrectly, and the crank proceeds to shows them their own correctly prepared meal, which is in fact made of play dough. </p><p>It's a great analogy and she does a better job of explaining it than I do here, but it reminded me of an incident where I did something crank-like at a restaurant that complicates the narrative a bit. </p><p>I should note that I completely agree with everything she says, and that this isn't meant to be a refutation of her video, more of a deeply weird story that's stuck with me for a long time that's both connected to her analogy and also the epistemological concerns her video raises.</p><p>So, the story - I was in Calgary visiting my family a few years after having moved to Toronto, circa 2000, and we went out to dinner to a local Italian restaurant. This restaurant was a small and highly popular local chain, and was known for <i>authentic</i> and affordable Italian food (This detail is important!).</p><p>At the time I was really into spaghetti carbonara. I would make it at home, and I would order it regularly whenever I was at an Italian restaurant. I'd even had it in Italy, and uh, Austria, so I feel confident in saying that I was pretty well-versed in the preparation and eating of spaghetti carbonara.</p><p>All this is to say that I ordered it at this well-known local restaurant. And when the dish came out, it wasn't spaghetti carbonara. It was scrambled eggs with bacon on pasta. </p><p>Now, to my many Italian-food-making readers, if you've made carbonara, you'll know exactly what's happened. Part of making carbonara is that you use an egg at the end to make a creamy sauce. Jamie Oliver demonstrates this here:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="347" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D_2DBLAt57c" width="417" youtube-src-id="D_2DBLAt57c"></iframe></div><br /><p>If you watch the video, he goes to some lengths to show that you can't put the egg in while the pasta and bacon are still too hot, because you'll wind up with scrambled eggs, which is what I got.</p><p>This is clearly what had happened, and in my naivete, I figured that they'd known this and just sent it out anyway. Because this is Canada. In the same way a bartender will pour a pint of beer that's mostly foam and serve it, daring you to send it back, I assumed they thought they could simply give it to me, and I'd eat it, because people do this all the time. </p><p>Unfortunately, I was at the height of my pretentious gourmand phase, where I had aspirations of becoming a food critic, and so I sent it back and asked them to make it correctly. As a Canadian, I was nice about it, and not the least bit passive aggressive.</p><p>So the waitress went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later, the manager of the restaurant came to me to ask me what the problem was. I was a bit surprised, but explained to him that what I was given wasn't carbonara - I mean, it was the same ingredients but it had been prepared incorrectly.</p><p>He had no idea what I meant. So I explained to him what I thought had happened, and he nodded and looked at me appreciatively in the way that service sector people do when you're doing something as condescending as explaining to the manager of an Italian restaurant how to make a very popular and not at all obscure pasta dish. And he apologized for the mistake, but then he suggested that I order something else.</p><p>That's when it dawned on me - <i>no one</i> had ever pointed out to the restaurant that this isn't what spaghetti carbonara was supposed to look like. This was a busy and popular Italian restaurant, and they'd been making carbonara for years like this, and no one had ever said anything. <br /></p><p>Why else would he tell me to order something else? If this were a one off, they'd just make it correctly, but they couldn't because no one knew what I was talking about. </p><p>I don't mean this as a dig to the cooks either - like most chains, these were probably not trained chefs but people hired to work cheaply in a busy kitchen, and who were following recipes. From their perspective, I was probably some Toronto snob who was telling them what to do - I wasn't even Italian! How would I know? </p><p>From their perspective, I was the crackpot!</p><p>But I did know, and in this day and age, one would probably just whip out their phone and show the manager 25 videos on YouTube demonstrating exactly how their kitchen was doing this incorrectly. But at the time, all I had was my word.<br /></p><p>Things got stranger - for the rest of the evening, whenever a waiter or waitress would walk by, they would apologize to me for the mix-up. There was this whole production that was clearly rehearsed to make me feel better, but I would have felt better knowing that they were going to make the dish correctly - I even offered to show them! And again, I understand that this would have made me look like an arrogant jerk, but I certainly would have felt better.</p><p>But then one wonders - let's say that the manager goes home, wondering if what I was saying was true, and goes to an Italian cookbook and discovers that I was telling the truth. What then? Maybe it was a popular item, and people might complain that it was different when they started preparing it correctly! Or maybe they'd rechristen it as their "house-style" carbonara, made just the way Nonna used to make at home!</p><p>But it raises an important question: what happens when the places that sell themselves as <i>authentic</i> and as experts, reveal themselves to be nothing of the sort?<br /></p><p>I left the restaurant with a sinking feeling, a kind of amused horror, and it's a feeling that I've been getting again recently, when I think about the rise of AI. </p><p>So much of what I've seen of ChatGPT in its deployment so far reminds me of that (now-gone) local authentic Italian restaurant chain, and how so many Calgarians thought it was great and authentic, all while being served scrambled egg pasta. I see all these people on YouTube talking about using ChatGPT to teach them stuff, but it's pretty clear that ChatGPT is not always reliable.</p><p>How we think of knowledge is shifting and how we deal with that shift is going to have some very serious implications, not just for AI replaceable people like me, but for questions of knowledge and what constitutes knowledge as opposed to belief.</p><p>Next up - where I complain about something I saw online! <br /></p>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-26316738546774752682023-05-15T11:56:00.001-04:002023-05-15T11:56:11.120-04:00Ian Hacking (1937-2023)<p>I found out yesterday that the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has passed away. The University of Toronto philosophy department has a notice <a href="https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/news/in-memoriam-ian-hacking-1936-2023/">here</a>, and Brian Leiter's philosophy blog has some great reminiscences <a href="https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/05/in-memoriam-ian-hacking-1936-2023.html">here</a>. What follows are my own reflections on his passing.<br /></p><p> It is difficult for me to overstate how important Ian Hacking was to me as a thinker. </p><p>Throughout my life, I have had a tendency to form what we now commonly refer to as "parasocial relationships". I'd find someone to admire and I'd read everything about them and then eventually I'd move on. </p><p>So it was in the early 2000s that I embarked on a (in hindsight ill-conceived) plan to get an MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto. The reason for this was pretty straightforward - at the time I was being passed over for jobs in the Ontario Government (where I worked) for people who had MAs in...just about anything. It was that simple! </p><p>At that point getting a graduate degree in music was out of the question (Why? Good question!) but in any case, like most clever young men, I thought I would really like to pursue a philosophy degree. </p><p>However, there was a catch - as someone with a music degree, I needed at least 10 half courses in philosophy to apply for the the MA program. I should add, and this will be important for later, U of T had very restricted enrollment for the MA due to the fact that the department, like most departments, saw its graduate program as a training program, and no one gets a job with an MA in philosophy - no one, except I hoped, for myself!</p><p>Anyway, I started accumulating credits, and at some point (the specific moment is lost to time) I found out about Ian Hacking. It might have been at a philosophy social, where I met him and had a nice brief conversation with him about his Wittgenstein course (which I couldn't take due to a scheduling conflict - I was taking these courses while holding down a full time job). </p><p>At some point, I started reading his work and was blown away by it. Although the analytic/continental philosophy wars seem to have died off, at the time (2002-2006?) they were very much alive. Ian Hacking somehow managed to straddle this distinction - he had come out of the analytical side, discovered Foucault, and then did philosophical genealogies à la Foucault, but which were in fact, much better than anything Foucault had produced. </p><p>Beyond this, he was perhaps the clearest philosophical writer I had ever read - he could take virtually any concept, from either side of the-then philosophical divide, and make it easy to understand for those of us who perhaps didn't have the time to invest in just reading the texts.</p><p>I read everything he wrote - books, papers, essays, even his reviews in the NY Review of Books. I wasn't ever able to take a course with him, again mostly due to scheduling conflicts, but so much of my philosophical underpinnings come from that reading - far more than any of the coursework I did.</p><p>In fact, calling my relationship to him "parasocial" doesn't really do justice to his influence on my thinking - it's more akin to ancient understanding of philosophical schools (Pierre Hadot's <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013735">What is Ancient Philosophy?</a> is a great introduction to this topic), where the practice of reading and discussing a philosopher's work transforms one's own perceptions of the world. </p><p>That's the kind of effect he had on me. I never got into the MA program (and wound up doing something very different indeed!) but I regularly think about Ian Hacking, his sense of wonder, and how he did philosophy, and it makes me want to look at the world anew after so many years of closing myself off to it. </p><p>I wish there were more people out there like him, and even if he never founded a philosophical school on the Athenian model, I'd like to think that his legacy might prod some of us (me, just me), to, in a clumsy paraphrase of one of his books, try to do a little less representing, and a little more intervening. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-25304742104415466822020-11-11T11:32:00.001-05:002021-06-21T10:52:01.835-04:00On Remembrance Day<p> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</p><p class="MsoNormal">After last week's Whole Foods poppy debacle, I found myself
unable to participate in yet another installment of the Canadian culture war
Kabuki theatre that is Remembrance Day.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We all know the drill – someone does something, <i>anything</i>
connected to poppies, and Conservative politicians briefly remind everyone
that virtue signalling and cancel culture are not the sole domain of the “Tumblr
left”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Following this comes the ritual denunciations of Remembrance
Day from the left, where we are all reminded that Canada is a colonial settler
culture, and that Remembrance Day has been effectively co-opted by the right to
gin up patriotic fervour for whatever imperial adventures we’ve decided the tag
along with.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The thing is, the specific history of Remembrance Day concerns
an unpayable debt that we owe to our ancestors – 106 years ago, this country began
to send its young over to die for what was, in hindsight, perhaps the most absurd
and pointless war in human history – nearly 60,000 Canadians died so that the House
of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha could remain the most powerful royal house in Europe. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thanks to this war, the Italians invented
fascism, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered and many of the political formations that
we find ourselves dealing with today find their genesis in the shadow of this
insane expression of nihilism.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So this debt remains, and it seems to me that so much of why
we undergo this culture war every year has to do with the fact that, as time
has passed, Remembrance Day shifted away from reminding ourselves of this unpayable
debt, and towards celebrating those who live, those for whom the debt can, in
some ways, be repaid.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is difficult to argue with this, as the bombers fly over
our house today, that despite its seeming solemnity, Remembrance Day has become
more of a celebration of military power and glory than an acknowledgement of
the emptiness of the vast majority of armed conflicts in which Canadians have
engaged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think we can now safely
include Afghanistan in this calculus - the 200 odd people who died there really
died for nothing, and no elegant flight formations, or poppy wearing, can
change that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Like many people on the left, I was outraged and horrified
by the jingoistic celebration of “our troops” who we sent off on an errand of
revenge after September 11, and that the invasion of Afghanistan was somehow a noble
and just war (history has shown us that it wasn’t).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That being said, there is something to be said for affirming
this debt on Remembrance Day, this throwing away of life for nothing, in part
because many of those who insist that one must wear a poppy are those who also
believe that there’s no need to shut the country down right and pay everyone to
stay home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That is, the current conditions we live under are akin to a
time of war, and instead of the left being in denial of this reality, it is the
right who seems to ever increasingly demand that we forget all those who have died
for nothing over the past 6 months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps
if there is value in Remembrance Day, in this Remembrance Day, it’s that if one
believes there is value to life, then today is a time to acknowledge that, to
acknowledge that we do indeed live in a society, and perhaps expand the scope
of Remembrance Day to include all those who have died for nothing, as a result
of the neglect of our governments, and our society, and a reminder that we can
do better than this.</p>
Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-40866521580458694352020-06-18T14:48:00.001-04:002020-06-18T14:48:59.834-04:00Back to Blogging<div>I went off of Facebook for about six years. There was a lot going on in my life, and after receiving some particularly depressing news, that desire to present some kind of avatar of myself felt impossible. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Three years ago, I returned to Facebook. My motivation for doing so was to in part to make it easier to be included on things with my wife, who had rejoined Facebook. It also became clear to me that the reasons I went off Facebook were no longer really relevant, and my status as "that guy who doesn't use Facebook" no longer had the cachet it did in 2010. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>So I have been back for about 3 years, and frankly it kinda sucks. I wound up using it as a quasi-blog, where I'd post links and complain about things, but the reality was that most of the posts that wound up with any feedback were posts where I shared a picture of our dog, or our son, or our son with a dog.</div><div><br /></div><div>This isn't to say that those things are bad, it's just that Facebook as a social space is pretty unhealthy in some really strange ways, ways that I only ever understand when I go off Facebook, which I did again about a month ago.</div><div><br /></div><div>My reasons this time were really different - I'm finishing my dissertation and given everything that is going on, Facebook just felt like an unhealthy distraction.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is all to say that I'm going to try to blog more, in part because I like writing about things, and feel more inclined to do so. But I tend to say this every few years, and nothing happens, so who knows? <br /></div>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-65580407371210750042020-02-03T11:06:00.002-05:002020-02-03T11:06:55.091-05:00Plain Language is Bad<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">I found</span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";"> this old essay by chance today. It's not bad, and reminds me that I was probably smarter a decade ago than I am now! The Medicare fraud letter remains chilling, and I still believe that the plain language movement is part of a far larger cultural trend that has immiserated us to no end. In any case, to the three of you who still read my blog, enjoy!</span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Government
Communications and Entertainment:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a
Brief Analysis of the Plain Language Movement</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 67.5pt; margin-top: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";"></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 67.5pt; margin-top: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">The
shamelessness of the rhetorical question “What do people want?” lies in the
fact that it appeals to the very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity
it specifically seeks to annul.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry” Dialectic
of Enlightenment, p. 116.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">There
is a certain irony to the fact that George Orwell is both the author of <i>Nineteen
Eighty Four</i> and the essay <i>Politics and the English Language</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Nineteen Eighty Four</i> has become a kind
of cautionary tale about governments and their relationship to the truth,
alerting people to the dangers of “newspeak” and the manufacture of truth by
governments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, <i>Politics and
the English Language</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, where Orwell
extols the virtues of clear and simple language, </span>has itself become the
foundational text for the Plain Language Movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">six
rules for clear writing, such as avoid the passive voice, form the grammatical
canon for the </span>movement, which seeks to eradicate “gobbledygook” from
legal and government communication, to ensure greater “readability” and
“clarity”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what began as a movement
opposed to government and legal standards of writing has now been fully embraced
by those institutions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Despite
the broad aims of the movement, and the depth of its transformative power in
shaping how governments communicate with their citizens, it is perhaps
surprising how little sociological research has been done to examine the ramifications
of the Plain Language Movement on public discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather
it has been assumed that plain language is good and necessary thing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My own experience as a bureaucrat can testify
to the near universal acceptance of plain language as a good thing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
brief essay will attempt to suggest some avenues for more closely examining how
plain language, far from engaging citizens, annuls that engagement by removing
citizens from the democratic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">process</i>,
by focusing on ends to the detriment of means. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">What
is plain language?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The United State
government's Plain Language (www.plainlanguage.gov) website has several
definitions<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a>:</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 69.75pt; margin-right: 66.75pt; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 10.0pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">A word about "plain
English." The phrase certainly shouldn't connote drab and dreary language.
Actually, plain English is typically quite interesting to read. It's robust and
direct—the opposite of gaudy, pretentious language. You achieve plain English
when you use the simplest, most straightforward way of expressing an idea. You
can still choose interesting words. But you'll avoid fancy ones that have
everyday replacements meaning precisely the same thing.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[2]</span></b></span></span></span></a></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 69.75pt; margin-right: 66.75pt; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 10.0pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Bryan Garner, from <em><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Legal Writing in Plain English,</span></em>
2001, pp xiv </span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-right: 66.0pt; mso-line-height-alt: 10.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">The next definition is from Professor
Robert Eagleson, an Australian scholar of plain language:</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 66.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 10.0pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Plain English is clear,
straightforward expression, using only as many words as are necessary. It is
language that avoids obscurity, inflated vocabulary and convoluted sentence
construction. It is not baby talk, nor is it a simplified version of the
English language. Writers of plain English let their audience concentrate on
the message instead of being distracted by complicated language. They make sure
that their audience understands the message easily.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[3]</span></b></span></span></span></a></span></i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 66.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 10.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">These
examples illustrate the broad aims of the movement:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To eliminate ornament from language, and to
make documents “readable”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A writer is
to find the “simplest” way of expressing an idea, and one is to avoid “fancy”
words when “ordinary” words will do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If one does this, the “audience” will
understand their text (or specifically their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">message</i>, a very important word indeed) “easily”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is important to note that complicated
language “distracts”, presumably because it forces one to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think</i> for a moment about what one is hearing. The focus of both
definitions is on economy as the hallmark of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">clarity</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, what does
clarity mean in practice for the Plain Language Movement?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">The
dramatic effect Plain Language has on government communications is best shown
through an example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the more
chilling examples is the following, from US government's plain language website.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is important to keep in mind that this transformation
is being sold as an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exemplar</i> of clear,
plain language:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Medicare Fraud Letter</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">The Medicare Beneficiary Services receives a lot of
Medicare fraud correspondence every year. To reach their customers more
effectively, they took an already short letter and made it even shorter and to
the point.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Before</span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Investigators at the contractor will review the
facts in your case and decide the most appropriate course of action. The first
step taken with most Medicare health care providers is to reeducate them about
Medicare regulations and policies. If the practice continues, the contractor
may conduct special audits of the providers medical records. Often, the
contractor recovers overpayments to health care providers this way. If there is
sufficient evidence to show that the provider is consistently violating
Medicare policies, the contractor will document the violations and ask the
Office of the Inspector General to prosecute the case. This can lead to
expulsion from the Medicare program, civil monetary penalties, and
imprisonment.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">After</span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">We will take two steps to look at this matter: We
will find out if it was an error or fraud.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 71.25pt; margin-right: 68.25pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">We will let you know the result.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[4]</span></b></span></span></span></a></span></i><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">It
is important to note that this is a letter regarding an allegation of
fraud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first letter goes to some
length to explain the process to the correspondent, and the possible outcomes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second omits this information, and
instead informs the correspondent that they will be told the outcome only when
the government has completed its investigation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>An opportunity to describe a government's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">process</i> becomes a statement of government <i>action</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, which letter is really “clearer”?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Instead
of providing the reader an opportunity to form their own thoughts, the second
letter, and indeed, many things written in “plain language” are designed to
narrow the interpretive space of communication down to nothing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar to Walter Benjamin’s views on newspaper
writing, the government strains to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interpret</i>
“what the people want”, so no other interpretation but the government’s
interpretation is possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second
letter in the example <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">explains</i>, while
the first letter <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">describes</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">This
is where the idea of the government “message” is of supreme importance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A politician, or a government, must remain
“on message”, in other words, they must stick to the script which allows as
little latitude as possible for interpretation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, through plain language, the idea of the message is sold as
populist clarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second letter,
ominous as it sounds, also leaves a clear message – the government is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">acting</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The key message of the second letter is the sense that the government is
“doing something”, not that the citizen has a role in that activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Thinking
of citizens as busy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">simple</i> people,
who want facts and to see action, is reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s
views on myth and its relationship to Enlightenment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As they write, “Enlightenment’s mythic terror
springs from a horror of myth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
detects myth not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words…but in any
human utterance which has no place in the functional context of
self-preservation.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plain language adherents see complex sentence
constructions and technical vocabularies not as the outcome of complex
government institutions, but as needless and wasteful, as a myth of government
which plain language can eradicate, at least when communicating to
citizens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, it forecloses the very possibility
that governments are complex, restricting that complexity to those who work in
government, who are themselves presumably not average.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Plain
language in a government setting presumes people are unwilling to want to
engage with their government in any more than a rudimentary, “practical”
way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It assumes not only that citizens want
their information to be handed to them, without the sense that they, as
citizens in a democracy, have a part to play in shaping that information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
assumes, in effect, that they want to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">entertained</i>
by their government.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">It
is telling that despite nearly 30 years of the plain language movement, as well
as strong support from the very governments it had targeted, voter turnout is
lower than ever and citizen disengagement in Canada has reached an all-time
high.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quote found at the head of
this essay seems more apt than ever:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Citizens
are less engaged perhaps because they understand that they are not really
necessary, except on occasion for reasons of legitimacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through plain language, the activity of
democratic government has been replaced by politics as light entertainment,
although I appreciate that this brief paper has only offered a glimpse of that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">However,
and perhaps this is the most perplexing question, who would have thought that this
alienation would have been cultivated using the very grammatical rules Orwell
developed as a caution against it?</span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a> <span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I am using the US government’s
website for clarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar examples
exist in Canada
as well.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/garner.cfm</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/eagleson.cfm</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before_after/medicarefraudltr.cfm</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=38560481#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-fareast-language: #00FF; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a> <span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.22</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-24592747807807768602020-01-07T10:52:00.003-05:002020-01-07T10:52:25.125-05:00Happy New Year!That's pretty much all I've got. Just trying to keep the door open. Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-7072252003223165702019-10-22T12:14:00.003-04:002019-10-22T12:14:33.301-04:00Yes, we're doomed. Although western Canadians (and much of my own family) are probably
looking at last night's election as some kind of personal slight on
Alberta, an apocalypse even, I think it's a lot more helpful to see what
happened last night as a referendum on the extent to which Canadians
believe in the reality and severity of global warming.<br />
<br />
On this
front, Alberta and Saskatchewan are going to be OK. 2/3 of Canadians
voted for parties who either pay lip service to global warming while
ignoring their own government's 5 year old emission reduction targets
(the Conservatives) or who loudly proclaim that global warming is real,
while spending more money on oil and gas development and pipelines than
any federal government in history and tinker around the edges in ways
that fall far short of our Paris accord targets. Moreover, if there
were any serious worries by anyone that the Trans Mountain pipeline
would be scrapped, those worries should have been put to rest. It will
be built.<br />
<br />
As for the other 1/3, those who might feel on a sliding
scale that global warming is the central existential issue of our age,
things are pretty bad. Although we were all fantasizing last night
about some kind of minority where the NDP or Greens held the of balance
of power, the size of the liberal minority, and the fear of another
election means that although the carbon tax will stay, it will be far
easier for the the Liberals to govern with the consent of the
Conservatives more often than not, than to constantly be attempting to
cobble together a more radically left wing political program, especially
given that on most economic and foreign policy issues, the liberals and
the conservatives are far closer to each other than they are to the
nominally left wing parties. And far from the BQ being some kind of
spoiler, I suspect it is Quebec that will be ignored when it comes to
issues that they care about (like global warming).<br />
<br />
This isn't to
say that many Westerners (pace BC of course) won't remain completely
unhinged from reality, from settled scientific discourse, or from the
positions of their own ruling class (the oil and gas industry) but as
someone with a lot of family there, I thought it important, after an
acrimonious election, to point out that they won a lot more than they
lost, even if the colour of the winners isn't the one that they liked
best.Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-4649893178575280242019-10-18T11:31:00.003-04:002019-10-18T11:31:52.492-04:00Are we doomed?In this empty corner of the blogosphere, this ghost town, there's really not much going on. I don't really read blogs anymore. There are maybe three that I manage to still click on with some regularity, but like many people, once Google Reader was replaced by Facebook, my reading habits shifted and now instead of reading too many blogs, I find myself just constantly reacting negatively to all of the stupid Facebook posts I see.<br />
<br />
So this is way of saying that, at this stage, I don't really expect anyone to read this either, but it's still my thing, a place to publicly muse about things, and so I will continue to indulge myself occasionally. This is also a passive aggressive way of suggesting that if you'd like to comment, feel free <br />
<br />
À propos, as many of my long time readers would know, I veer between talking about politics and talking about culture, with random things in between. Given we're a few days away from possibly electing a Conservative government (again!), a government which explicitly rejects the existential issue of our age (as opposed to the Liberals, who acknowledge it while hoping they can continue to kick the can down the road) I have to say, it has been difficult to wrap up my dissertation on a 19th Century German poet and his relationship to medieval German culture. <br />
<br />
I should say that it's not quite that I'm falling into the trap of "my dissertation is a waste of time, the humanities are a waste of time" kind of thinking that does trip one up often, rather it's more that I really feel as though I should be doing more than writing this dissertation, or blogging, or whatever it is I do on a day-to-day basis.<br />
<br />
The earth is burning and I live in a country that will surely become a battleground in my lifetime, both in the figurative sense and the literal one, and most of my fellow citizens would prefer to either deny the reality of our situation, or kick the can down the road until the sliver of opportunity that we have now is gone. <br />
<br />
This is incredibly demoralizing - I mean, I really would just prefer to practise the piano or the organ and sing and conduct, none of which I do exceedingly well (or often enough), but it is generally difficult to do much when all one sees around them is the end of the world, and end that comes not as a bang but as a decay, and with it the end of the idea that there's a future that might be better for our children.<br />
<br />
This prospect is made even more difficult because a) I have a child, a teenager in fact, and b) a lot of people with teenagers and little kids are totally fine in this country with electing someone whose policies will ensure that our children's lives will be worse than ours. I mean, this has been going on for a long time (my entire adult life I'd say? Or at least since the turn of the century?) but I don't know if I've ever really seen people be so brazen about it, about the fact that they'd trade their children's access to a healthy environment, and doom them to war because the world's resources are dwindling and Canada will be one of the last habitable places on earth, for a few hundred dollars in tax cuts so they can drive an SUV around for a few more years before the revolution comes.<br />
<br />
In other words, when did nihilism officially become a telos in this country for oh, about 2/3 of Canadians? I've always believed that Canadians are fundamentally pretty nihilistic as a people, with our soft sense of cultural and national identity, but this has always been offset by our newness as a country, and that the idea of Canada was still a largely unfinished political project, a project that could (and would) be improved on, a place where reconciliation could not only be acknowledged but actually happen, and where as as the second largest nation on earth, we'd eventually rise up to our unique role as stewards of this vast land, rather than fall back to our old ways as exploiters. At this historical moment, a moment where we are so clearly running out of time, Canadians are not only failing each other in droves, we are failing our ancestors and our descendants.<br />
<br />
This sense of the expanse of time opening before me and behind me is both inescapable and overwhelming. Whenever I get into some dumb Facebook bunfight over some stupid post by someone whose brain has been curdled by the right-wing social media serotonin machine, the one thing I always want to say, but never do, is that I hope they remember what they wrote there, or how they voted. <br />
<br />
In 10 years, when things are so much worse because we decided our cars were more important than our children, and that a beer fridge in the basement was more valuable than clean drinking water for Attawapiskat, I really hope that, like anyone who gets ostracized because of something they said on social media, they will be held accountable, that they'll have to answer, even if only to their children, why they chose, at this crucial moment in human history, tax cuts over the well-being of future generations, or service cuts over ensuring that the most vulnerable of us can not only maintain an adequate standard of living, but have something resembling a flourishing human existence, an existence which we Canadians, could easily afford to provide for everyone, but don't. <br />
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That I feel as though I am asking a lot of my fellow Canadians in wanting them to vote for idea of a better future over the (illusory) possibility of "cash" in your pocket, a literal bribe to ignore the devastation we are wreaking on this earth for another five years, is perhaps the most demoralizing thing of all. <br />
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All that being said, and in an attempt to be true to this blog's mandate (as well as begin to develop some real social media synergy by posting identical content on a multitude of platforms, please enjoy this visualization of the first prelude from Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier, the piece we sent up into space to show the
universe that intelligent life once lived here. Although I'm no longer
convinced that listening to Bach might alter the course of history for
the better, it certainly won't hurt .<br />
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Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-51380735730116057082019-07-16T16:22:00.001-04:002019-07-16T16:25:28.932-04:00I have little to sayHowever, I wanted to at least get more than 3 posts out this year. Here's to hoping I will have something to say soon!<br />
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Actually, one thought. 50 years ago today the Apollo 11 launched. Despite many great strides in terms of how we treat previously marginalized peoples, it is difficult to say that, 50 years after putting someone on the moon, humanity is closer to transcending our instincts and building a better future. Instead we appear to be not only slipping into barbarism, but doing so at a moment when the earth might not be able to survive that barbarism.Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-84276659311629195382019-06-12T12:37:00.004-04:002019-06-12T12:37:48.664-04:00BWV 129 - Gelobet sei der Herr, mein GottThis coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday which, for many Christian churches, effectively ends the half year of seasonal changes in the liturgical calendar, leaving the churchgoer with a sense of stability and presumably, boredom, until the church year ends with the coming of Advent.<br />
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It also happens to the day I was meant to conduct the above Bach Cantata 20 years ago. For reasons not worth going into here, this was delayed until the Fall of 1999, making it less a liturgical experience and more of a service with an orchestral and choral accompaniment. <br />
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If you read far enough back, I had a strange <a href="https://the-transcontinental.blogspot.com/2008/12/blogging-bach-cantatas-advent-i.html">plan to blog through</a> all of the Karl Richter recordings of the Bach Cantatas in 2009, doing a blog post for each and every one he'd chosen in order. I managed to get the first one out, but then missed the second week, and I guess decided I needed to wait another year to start again (How silly of me!). <br />
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Well, it's ten years later, and now I'm blogging about a second cantata, which also has the virtue of being one I've conducted, nearly 20 years ago. <br />
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What can I say about it? It's a really beautiful chorale cantata, which means, the cantata is based around a Lutheran chorale. This one is by Johann Olearius, called, uh, "Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott". As is common with Bach's chorale cantatas, there are five movements: the first movement has the first verse of the chorale as a cantus firmus in the top voice while the everyone else sings and plays around it. In this case, the first movement is quite triumphant and a lot of fun to sing (and conduct).<br />
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The middle movements are solo sections with a reduced number of players, much like the solo sections of the St. Matthew or St. John Passions, with the text usually a commentary on the themes of the chorale text. The final movement is then a harmonization of the chorale melody with orchestral accompaniment. All in all very satisfying, although the chorale, interestingly enough, doesn't really have anything to do with the Trinity, which is probably for the best.<br />
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It's odd feeling listening to it all these years later- firstly, I'm currently the organist at the church where I first conducted this cantata. Secondly, my German is a lot better - I can actually understand what they're saying in German instead of having to rely on the translation. Thirdly, I am a much better musician and conductor than I was then.<br />
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Our doing this piece back 1999 had a lot more to do with my ambition than anything. But we did pull it off, and some of the people who sang there, who I see occasionally back in the church, still comment on the performance, which remains a highlight for me, even if the video recording of it is long lost, and the orchestra we hired to perform with us is long since disbanded. <br />
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Indeed, the music is still at the church, sorted carefully away, probably never to be used again, although I suppose, given I'm the organist right now, that's an overly pessimistic view on my own part!Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-29767272209160045782019-06-06T16:39:00.001-04:002019-06-06T17:03:17.052-04:00Pokémon Detective Pikachu The film's opening scene presents us with the telos of the world of Pokémon: Tim Goodman (in case one wasn't sure of his role in the movie) is cajoled by a close friend, who we never see again, into attempting to catch a Pokémon.<br />
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Like the game that inspired it, the movie sets the stage by focusing on that quintessential Pokémon experience - subduing and entrapping a wild creature in order to force it to fight repeatedly for the honour and glory of the one who entrapped it.<br />
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However, unlike the game, which is refreshingly open about the power relations that exist between Pokémon and humans by simply forcing you, the child player, into capturing a Pokémon in the name of scientific discovery, the movie does away with this and opts for a saccharine "explanation" that the Pokémon must choose their trainer....effectively consenting to their enslavement.<br />
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Although this opening might lead one to believe that <i>Pokémon Detective Pikachu</i> will continue to mystify and obscure these power relations, (although one could admittedly read the Pokémon's willingness to enter the Pokéball as a metaphor for our own lack of willingness to overthrow capitalism) the central conflict of the movie itself not only exposes this unequal relationship for all to see, but actually doubles down on the slavery-as-friendship motif and turns the only true revolutionary figure in the film (Howard Clifford, played by Bill Nighy) into (<b>Spoiler Alert!</b>) its main villain.<br />
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Howard Clifford is the founder of Ryme City, where Pokémon live freely side-by-side with humans, and where Pokémon battles are illegal. Ryme City is presented as a virtual paradise - a densely populated, technologically sophisticated mega-city that simultaneously flourishes with stunning biodiversity. Outside of Ryme City, the old ways prevail, where wild Pokémon are caught and stored in balls until their trainer decides to let them out, so that they can fight another enslaved Pokémon until one or the other passes out from its injuries and people live in quaint but deeply boring villages and countrysides.<br />
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In contrast to the usual fetishization of the rural or natural, Ryme City is framed as an utopian space while the natural is positioned as dangerous. Indeed, the violent car crash that frames the movie's narrative takes place over a rural bridge, and the dystopic lab where Pokémon are subjected to genetic experiments is in the remote countryside. Over and over again, the movie shows us that untamed nature is violent and dangerous - indeed, Detective Pikachu himself suffers a nearly fatal injury in the midst of a forest upheaval which in and of itself is the result of a number of giant genetically-altered Pokémon.<br />
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Now you might be asking yourself - what is the central conflict of the film? Well it turns out that Howard Clifford is a transhumanist, and not content with creating the paradise that it Ryme City, he intends to reshape humanity itself by fusing Pokémon with their companions, effectively turning every Pokémon into a synthesis of man and animal.<br />
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Our heroes, Tim Goodman and his friend, the plucky reporter Lucy (of course she's a reporter, what other profession better signifies impotent opposition than a member of the press?) uncover this plot and, unsurprisingly, manage to foil it, and separating Pokémon again from their trainers.<br />
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But what are the implications of this? In the context of the film Ryme City was built on a lie, and its founder, Howard Clifford, has been exposed as a transhumanist fraud and thrown in jail. How might the city react? Well, presumably it will do so in a reactionary way, by returning to the good old ways, and re-enslaving Pokémon in order to use their pain as entertainment for the masses.<br />
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But wasn't Howard onto something? Shouldn't his radical, Pokémon liberating ways actually be celebrated, and not condemned? The movie's response to what made him bad was that he did not ask people's consent to reverse the power relationship, to enslave humanity by turning Pokémon into Pokéballs for humanity. One could argue that, in the face of a global climate catastrophe, a humanity that lives on within the biodiversity of the natural world, rather than in opposition to it, is in many ways a vastly more elegant and hopeful path than the one presented in the film as the "happy ending", which is to basically affirm late capitalism, but this time with someone at the helm (Howard's son) who will be a "gooder" capitalist than his father.<br />
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And in a supreme ironic gesture, it is revealed that Detective Pikachu himself has been this very synthesis all along - the reason Detective Pikachu speaks is because MewTwo ( the most powerful Pokémon, who is incidentally the product of human tampering) fused Tim's father Harry into his Pikachu. At the core of the dramatic action of the film is the very thing that the film itself explicitly repudiates at the level of the political.<br />
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All in all, it gives new meaning to "Gotta Catch 'Em All - Pokémon".Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-66403156673881298012019-06-05T15:35:00.005-04:002019-06-05T15:35:58.695-04:00The end that never comesIt's been over three years since I wrote anything on this blog. I have no explanation as to why it's taken me this long to post something again, except that blogging has been dying for years and I was never very good or reliable as a blogger anyway. I also went on Facebook again, which substituted for blogging, albeit for a much smaller audience, but clearly provided a dopamine rush that blogging has never been able to match since oh, maybe 2004?<br />
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I always felt that I would be shutting this thing down officially, or, failing that, Blogger would simply remove my blog without telling me, and this archive of my thoughts would be gone forever. Instead it seems that it will just continue to hobble along on its own, with or without me. <br />
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But this thing has been around for 13 years, which is kind of amazing, and it recalls to me all of the plans I'd made, the various postures and tones I'd taken, how often I can hear <i>myself </i>writing something, and how often it doesn't sound like me at all. But it was all me! <br />
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I am also aware that this, like a lot of my posts, is a content-free plea for time, yet another request for my reader's indulgence. But the door is still open, so I may as well let myself in here once in a while.<br />
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What will I post about? Who knows? And really, who cares? I never did. Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-7554208459112178482016-02-22T10:20:00.002-05:002016-02-22T10:20:43.811-05:00It's the Humanties, StupidThe Toronto's Star's <a href="http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2016/02/22/young-grads-need-to-brush-up-on-3-rs-employers-say.html">top story right now </a>is about how employers are saying that young people don't know how to read and write.<br />
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Keeping in mind that the "employer survey" is not a terribly scientific document, and are usually used to signal employers' desire to flood the market with a particular kind of workers (whose wages coincidentally go down due to the glut of people) The solution being proposed would be something akin to an SAT test, which generally test you more on test taking than critical thinking! <br />
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However, the thing that really shocked me about the article was how the obvious
answer, that there has been a decades-long assault on a humanities education at virtually every level of secondary and post-secondary education, was completely ignored.<br />
<br />
Instead we're treated to the usual bromides about how kids these days are all sheltered babies who cannot be more than five seconds away from their cell phones without going into withdrawal. Or that schools have lowered their standards. All of which may be true (although in my teaching experience I don't really see it, except for the cell phone bit), but the reality is that the place where students best learned critical thinking was in a good old well-rounded liberal arts education.<br />
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However, universities, starved of public cash and hungry for private money, listened to these same employers who, in the 90's, declared that learning a foreign language and reading Chaucer would ill-equip you for the "real world" and have been shutting down or reducing the sizes of humanities departments, a culling that has only intensified since the 2008 financial meltdown. Now it turns out that those things also, coincidentally, benefited employers, who are now seeing the results of their influence in the 90's come back to haunt them! <br />
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So instead of blaming these anecdotal problems on the Internet or bad parenting, perhaps we could look at the actual systemic changes we have made to education over the past 20-30 years, and question that. Or failing that, simply stop listening to employers. <br />
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<br />Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-68959525744352687612015-11-19T10:09:00.002-05:002015-11-19T10:09:48.742-05:00Very, very Slow News DayDespite the very many things going on right now, here in Canada and around the world, the Toronto Star managed to make one of today's top stories the fact that the <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/11/19/navy-bands-new-bassoon-will-cost-25000-to-40000.html">Department of National Defense is buying a bassoon</a>.<br />
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Could this be the stupidest non-story ever to grace the Star's pages? Maybe not, but the "reporter", <a href="http://www.thestar.com/authors.sachgau_oliver.html">Oliver Sachgau</a>, perhaps trying to obscure the fact that he comes from the land of classical music, manages to open the story with the following:<br />
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<i>How much would you pay for a bassoon?</i></div>
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<i>Probably nothing, seeing as you can just buy a fog horn for cheaper, and get more use out of it.</i></div>
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A-Hyuk! I can just imagine young Oliver, sitting in the Star bullpen thinking "This is it, this is my chance to really make a difference. We've all heard those stories about expensive screwdrivers - who would pay good TAXPAYER (cue angels) money on a musical instrument for a military band? I'm really going to have to pull out the stops on this one. Think Oliver, think -what does a bassoon sound like - a foghorn! And a foghorn is more useful than a bassoon! This story is going to bring down the entire military musical industrial complex! I'll be a hero!"<br />
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This, my friends, is journalism in the digital age - a mere 5 minutes of research would have revealed to him that actually, a professional bassoons could cost this much money. <br />
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Moreover, why shouldn't a military band have a good instrument to play? When I was in high school, I was lucky to receive a brand-new professional Yamaha tuba to play on. The instrument cost $7,000 20 years ago. Go on, Oliver, go write a sanctimonious hit piece about how the TDSB is wasting money on musical instruments for students. Hey, you should really look into this - I bet they buy music for the bands too, new music at full price! What an outrage!<br />
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I guess that's why I'm bothering to right about this - this is sanctimonious garbage reporting on the part of the Toronto Star, where they take something that's probably, on balance, in the public good, but turn it into a criticism of government spending. The underlying message is: the government is wasting your hard-earned money on these things when they should be giving money to "better" causes. <br />
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Here's a novel piece of information - governments do a lot more then issue you a driver's license every 5 years. I thought the Star knew this, but playing the arts for laughs doesn't really sit well with me, and they should be ashamed.</div>
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Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-24833802306953502702015-10-20T12:15:00.003-04:002015-10-20T12:15:43.266-04:00Relieved but disappointedThat's how I feel today. About what you may ask? That's for you to figure out!Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-51915468661186216022015-07-14T11:00:00.000-04:002015-07-14T11:00:06.819-04:00Jon Vickers<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/arts/music/jon-vickers-opera-star-known-for-his-raw-power-and-intensity-dies-at-88.html?_r=0">has died</a>.<br />
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I know I never write on this stupid blog anymore, but man, I really felt this. He was 88, so it's not as though there was some tragedy to this, but he was probably one of the most distinct and emotionally powerful opera singers ever, and the fact that he is no longer around is really sad.<br />
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Something I spent listening to last year, over and over, was his singing of "<span class="st"><em>So starben wir</em>, <em>um ungetrennt"</em> from Act II of <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>. So amazing, and really, it's the part of the opera that you need to hear before the Liebestod to really punch you in the gut, because Isolde is there, alone, singing what she and Tristan had been singing together. I would encourage you to seek it out, to hear that voice of his. </span>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-75297190090025439712014-11-08T06:09:00.002-05:002014-11-08T06:09:21.740-05:00Glenn Gould - Off the Record/On the RecordI discovered yesterday that the National Film Board has made its 1959 documentary about Glenn Gould available on YouTube. The first part is entitled <i>Glenn Gould - Off the Record/On the Record</i> and it's fantastic! Here's Part I:<br />
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I am amazed that in all the years I've been writing on this blog this is only the second time I've ever mentioned Gould.<br />
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I used to borrow (and renew) a VHS copy of this documentary back when I was in high school - I couldn't get enough of it. Watching it again, the sheer energy that comes from his Bach playing is something that never fails to amaze me.<br />
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It also reminds me of just how my own musical tastes, even today, are very much a reflection of Gould's. I was pretty impressionable, but I already loved Bach, so it would be natural that I would discover Gould. Given how much I enjoyed his playing, his opinions came with a certain authority that I couldn't really object to. <br />
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Although I've moved on considerably, I cannot help but think that one of the main reasons Richard Strauss' <i>Der Rosenkavalier</i> is my favourite opera has a lot to do with Gould's advocacy of Strauss as a composer. <br />
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These documentaries are also a wonderful window into late 1950's North America. It is difficult not to watch these and think "wow, Mad Men really nailed that era", but also the fact that classical music, at this time, still had a fair bit of cultural credibility, which is something I've long written about, and which I may find myself writing about again! <br />
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Here's Part II:<br />
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Enjoy!Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-41122884939900433662014-11-04T11:41:00.001-05:002014-11-04T11:41:16.472-05:00On Not Working<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/the-art-of-not-working-at-work/382121/2/">This article</a> from the Atlantic on not being busy at work managed to hit close to home and also widely miss the mark.<br />
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As a graduate student and a former civil servant...yes, take that in folks - not having much to do is a topic that I can clearly speak to with great authority!<br />
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When I try to describe being out of the civil service to people, I always want to be balanced in my sentiment, mainly because this is really how I feel - most of my closest friends are people I met in the public service, and I can safely say that there were many days in the various jobs I had where I felt like I was "making a difference" in some way and also working my ass off.<br />
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But there were other times...those times, they were like being in a kind of prison. I would say this to people, and they would laugh (laugh! because you're a civil servant, so how bad can it be?). There were times where I would go to work, and there was no work to do, and I had to be there, but I couldn't do my own thing, so all I could do was sit, finding things to do that skirted the edges of office culture etiquette. Actually, I hear that in prison, you can take courses and work out. (No, I'm not saying that prison is better than an office job, I'm making an analogy and using a joke to illustrate it.) The first few weeks of this, especially after being busy, come as a relief. But then the rot sets in..<br />
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You know why lots of people surf the Internet at their jobs? Because if
they were reading a book they would immediately be castigated for
"slacking". In a white collar environment, people sleep where they poop when it comes to their work - that's what the Alt-Tab key command is for. Smartphones have only made this worse - it's now acceptable to check
your phone every three seconds even though you're really reading Gawker and
not texting a local official about emergency preparedness.<br />
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I even did what the article dutifully told me to do, and I spoke to my bosses about my lack of work, and they would throw things my way, but it was usually something that took about 15 minutes out of an 8 hour day. I had been hired specifically to do a particular job, but when I arrived it turned out that a bunch of other people were already doing the job, and also had the resources behind them to do it. All I could do was tag along.<br />
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The irony of course was that there were other people in the office who were busy. Those busy people, perhaps unsurprisingly, resented those of us with not
much to do. And I don't blame them! There is so much shame associated
with being a civil servant to begin with, that being one of <i>those</i> civil servants, without a lot to do...it's not the best psychological environment for anyone.<br />
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I have also been one of those busy people. For a number of years, I would get into the office, sit down, and basically write until I went home at the end of the day. And then I would go home and mentally prepare what I had to write for the next day so that I could do it efficiently enough to get through the day. These jobs are great because at that moment, we feel as though we're alive.<br />
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But being busy isn't nearly as newsworthy or interesting as collecting a pay cheque for doing nothing, so I'll go back to that.<br />
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It didn't help that I was working for Don Draper, except that instead of Don Draper, it was an idiot who thought s/he was Don Draper. Indeed, those in charge would obstruct my desire to pursue other things because, wait for it, <i>my pretend real job was too important</i>! My office chair wasn't going to warm itself! And who was going to write that presentation which, after months of deliberation, would be thrown out the window at the last minute for a completely different approach that no one had agreed to and would invariably be completely ignored by the people we were targeting because it sounded "cool".<br />
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The most work I ever did in that office was helping people in a completely different department with their communications. They were nearby, and they liked me, so in effect, I wound up working for a department that I didn't work for, simply out of sheer boredom. But I enjoyed helping them, so it made things worthwhile until I resigned.<br />
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So, the major failing of this article - it attempts to be sympathetic to people working in a situation similar to mine, but it frames the entire debate as being one where the workers are "slacking", or "lazy", or "worthless", and placing all of the responsibility for their onto the workers themselves, who rarely have a lot of control over their own work. <br />
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Did I procrastinate sometimes? Yup. Was I always performing at my optimum capacity? Nope. Did I hire myself into a job that had no duties attached to it, when it was sold as an exciting super-busy opportunity? Uhhhh....<br />
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I can point to many times in my adult life where my boredom in a job translated into some really good opportunities because out of the boredom came a certain amount of creativity. But creating your own opportunities can be pretty threatening to the status quo as well, which is why it's often easier to keep someone around doing nothing than it is to let them do whatever they wanted - indeed, in a supreme irony, the one thing I would consider my biggest accomplishment at my time in this most Kafkaesque of jobs was the thing that got me into the most trouble. So it's tough to stay motivated in a situation like that.<br />
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But off the top of my head I can see all kinds of reasons why most people spend more time on the Internet than working, none of which involve making the people who work in these kinds of situations feel more shame, or a perverse sense that they're "gaming the system".<br />
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The reality is that if I weren't sitting in that office, exchanging my time for a salary, the good taxpaying citizens of Ontario, many of whom are also doing nothing at their jobs while reading celebrity blogs or shopping online, would be outraged over how some civil servant wasn't at their desk doing nothing in their job! And they would share their outrage with you on Twitter and Facebook during their own office hours. And we would all point out fingers at all the hypocrisy going on, while nothing changed.<br />
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Perhaps instead we should be asking how it is we live in a world where doing something that interests you, even for smart, talented people, is becoming increasingly difficult at the very moment when it's supposed to be easier than ever. Or how we manage to live in the richest societies in human history, and there is not enough work to go around in an office, but also not enough jobs for everyone to be gainfully employed.<br />
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Maybe constantly shaming people for their circumstances isn't the best thing to do, even though it's pretty much the foundation of discourse on the Internet.<br />
Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-47251684671467813482014-10-28T07:06:00.000-04:002014-10-28T07:06:01.047-04:00Our long civic nightmare is over - or is it?I was out over the weekend, having drinks (probably too many of them) but attempting to explain why there's a large part of me that is, for lack of a better word, often ashamed to be a Canadian right now.<br />
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I suppose it's safe for me to say that I'm far from a supporter of our current federal government, or the current (at least until the end of yesterday) Mayor of Toronto. But it's not just that they're right-wing and I'm not, it's more about the ways in which Canadians have become so much pettier and meaner than I recall growing up, and how our current governments often reflect that. <br />
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By reflect, I mean that nearly half of voters in the last civic election voted for Rob Ford, knowing full well who he was and what he stood for. And he delivered on his "mandate". <br />
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John Tory? I usually remember him as the guy who used to real suck up to Mike Harris, which made me sick, but then I actually felt a bit sorry for him when he lost as PC leader over, of all things, funding for religious schools.<br />
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Now I know that I'm pretty much the only person (especially on the left) who feels this way, but I always thought he got a bad rap for losing the election over this issue. Given we already fund Catholic schools, why not fund all the other religious schools? And then they all would have to play by the government's rules - despite what people think about government, that's how it works. If you want the money, prepared to have every last cent of it accounted for. Wouldn't it be a better idea to bring these private schools into the tent than leaving them outside?<br />
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But it turned out that raising the spectre of "Muslim" schools was more than enough for the good people of Ontario to reject him, even though, like the whole Sharia Law thing a number of years back, Ontarians decided it would be better to exclude Muslims from the law than to bring Sharia Law into the framework of the Canadian legal system. <br />
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Canadians are good at talking about diversity, or being smug about diversity, but actually reflecting it in our institutions? Not so much!<br />
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But I don't come here to talk about the mayor. <br />
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No, I want to talk about the story that's overshadowing the fact that there will hopefully never be a Mayor Ford of Toronto - the firing by the CBC of Jian Gomeshi.<br />
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Given what's come out, it's pretty difficult to see anything good on Gomeshi's side - the calculated Facebook post, followed by the numerous allegations, and so on. It's all very ugly. But here's the disclaimer- none of my opinion on what happened matters or has any bearing on the truth!<br />
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But the thing that really got me was how many Torontonians, when they heard about this, answered "I'm not surprised." Really, you "Toronto media and arts scene" assholes? Really? You weren't surprised that he allegedly <i>hit and choked </i>various women?<br />
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Is this what passes for being an "insider" in Toronto - I thought a membership to The Spoke Club or an invitation to the latest secret supper club inside the back of a food truck was good enough back in the day, but everyone "knowing" a prominent CBC Radio personality is supposedly doing this kind of stuff to people?<br />
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Maybe being across the pond, I'm seeing this rather differently than if I were there, but it's difficult not to think that most of the Torontonians who went around saying this all over the Internet the past few days were just reinforcing their own social capital, which is, quite frankly, insane to me. <br />
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There are people defending him, there are people excoriating him, and then there are people telling you that they knew about this all along on twitter, and then defending or excoriating him. Two of those three groups live in the real world, the other lives in downtown Toronto.<br />
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This is what infuriates me about Toronto -how incredibly blind people are to the world and that even we Canadians do awful things to each other and other people, all around the world. Here's a news flash for Canadians - we are no better than anyone else in the world <br />
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We do awful things, and we let awful things be done to people, and then we tweet about knowing how these things happened all along, and it's the latter that seems to be the most important thing. It seems trivial to say this, but there are going to be long term ethical and political implications to seeing the world this way. And that frightens me.<br />
<br /><br />Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-65150709505947452972014-10-25T08:35:00.001-04:002023-05-29T11:18:43.157-04:00Cash is the limit point of irony, or, things that have been in my head for a long timeIf any of you were reading me five years ago, you might recall that one of my many failed projects was an examination of hipsterdom. Back in 2009, this would have been cutting edge research, but because I was either lazy or busy (or other things that one could discern from this blog back in the day...) I never got past the first piece I did on the Black Hoof, which has become an institution.<br />
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I talked about hipsters as an artifact of late capitalism. I thought that sounded pretty novel - well, it turns out that pretty much everyone already thought this. Indeed, N+1, the literary magazine founded by white guys my age (like me!) published a book called "What was the hipster?", which I got with my subscription to, uh, N+1.<br />
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It's a good little book, and it kind of killed my project, in part because it had so much more authority than my blog, and better research too. But there was always one thing that bugged me about the book, of which a good excerpt <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/">is here</a>, which was that Mark Grief, the author of the piece, stated that the hipster emerged in 1999. I don't really disagree with him, but I've always been convinced that the hipster aesthetic emerged before that, and my evidence for this has always been Fiona Apple's "Criminal" video:<br />
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Actually, I'll just say right now that I think this video pretty much invented the aesthetic. By which I mean it made the 70's look like the 90's, and this is where we are now, isn't it? Go back and watch and episode of Friends, or the last season of Seinfeld, and tell me they haven't aged. But this? It could have been filmed yesterday. Or 10 years ago, even! But this video is closer to 20 years old, which is mind boggling. (Oddly enough, <i>Tidal </i>represents one of maybe 10 popular music albums I've purchased in the past 20 years, most of which happened around 1997-98.)<br />
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The reality is that the most authority I've ever had on this is when I wrote a post eight years ago about Ossington Avenue, and it's kind of cool because Ossington is so unrecognizable now in that piece, entirely due to hipster gentrification (I'm actually using this term ironically, just wait!) <br />
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It captured a moment, and also my own ambivalence about my role in the world, which at that time was centered around Queen and Ossington. (This ambivalence is a large part of why I post so infrequently now)<br />
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But I do have a couple of things to say about hipsters that I couldn't say five years ago. Besides my Fiona Apple Conjecture, I'm pretty sure the early 21st Century hipster and what we refer to as hipsters now are two totally different things - the early version were people who get referred to as the shock troops of gentrification - they gave a place a cool edginess, but usually without the scariness of the Other -they somehow felt both welcoming and exclusive. I'm thinking of a place like the Communist's Daughter, which is now an institution. Or the Lakeview Diner, which was an institution before its makeover, and is now an institution.<br />
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But always lurking in the background were people like me - thirtysomething upper middle class white people. We were waiting there, letting the hipsters do the heavy lifting, and then we got in there and built condos and squeezed out the original hipsters. But the process was so strangely organic, with Category 1 hipsters becoming Category 2 hipsters once they got a job in the civil service, that no one really noticed that the hipster, who everyone associated with say, <span class="st"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_Snow">Dash Snow</a>, somehow became the hipster of the Portlandia series, that is, bourgeois, domesticated. </span><br />
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<span class="st">The hipster that Mark Grief describes died out a while ago, but it still signifies two things - people with big glasses and lumberjack shirts, and then people who own the bars these people drink at. They kind of look the same, but they seem to represent two very different things.</span><br />
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<span class="st">I mean, you can have conservative hipsters now! There are actually guys, who wear lumberjack shirts and have beards with short, pomaded hair, and who vote for Stephen Harper. I've met them. This is not something I could have imagined 10 years ago. Hipsterdom is rather like punk now - something a lot of people loathed, and a lot of people loved, but now it's just an aesthetic.</span><br />
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<span class="st">This is also why I got tired of writing about this stuff - I wanted to deconstruct the irony that the hipster, in the movement's (actually not bad) celebration of kitsch and trash begat the $15 macaroni and cheese. But in doing this it also meant participating economically by consuming all this expensive crap. Because the only way one could participate in being a hipster was by paying $20 for a hamburger and fries, which was actually a pretty good sign that the way I, and everyone else, was talking about hipsters was deeply, deeply confused. For a brief moment, hip meant affordable and interesting. But then irony got expensive.</span><br />
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<span class="st">There's maybe no better example of this now than <a href="http://www.blogto.com/bars/wallflower-toronto">Wallflower</a>. It's a bar on Dundas near Lansdowne. I was first attracted to it because it has that faded charm that so many bars in Berlin have. (Yes, I am aware of the fact that just saying that says a lot about me, but here we are!)</span><br />
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<span class="st">But then they charge $6 for a "mug" of beer, which actually works out to $8 a pint, and it occurred to me that I was not in a Category 1 hipster bar, but a Category 2 hipster bar. By which I mean that people with money, who want to make money, are running Wallflower - it is such a calculated environment, but not in the way a fancy restaurant is, no, all the calculation is in the effort the owners took in hiding its calculatedness. Hey, it's really just a low key relaxed place, with distressed wood and faded wallpaper. And expensive beer served in a way that evokes drinking out of mason jars. </span><br />
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<span class="st">There is some irony in this digression - I'm pretty sure that the person who owns Wallflower owns the Communist's Daughter. So there's a circle there, somewhere.</span><br />
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<span class="st">But I am boring myself with this, and I didn't really have a point except that this has been laying in the fragments of my mind for a while, and now that it's gone, I can make room for other thoughts. At least I think that's how it works. </span>Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38560481.post-63946847263828484732014-09-24T07:56:00.000-04:002014-09-24T07:56:03.331-04:00This blog still existsIt seems odd to think that this blog has been around for 7 years, limping along, a post here and there, lately reflecting not much more than a profound desire to avoid writing. Of course we know why- there's a dissertation to be written!<br />
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In any event, writing at all has proven difficult. And indeed, when one looks across the infinite horizon of the virtual landscape, there are moribund blogs everywhere. So maybe it isn't just me.<br />
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I also know that people have moved on, to Facebook, to twitter, etc. There are places where essays are also read and shared (metafiler is a good example), but blogging, that medium that "forced" newspapers to add comment sections to the bottoms of their articles, to the benefit of no one, now seems to have been a passing fad, consigned to the dustbin of internet history.<br />
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Instead we have sites like, uh, Medium, which is basically a blog, but it was created by one of the founders of twitter, and it's somehow new.<br />
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Does this seem like I'm complaining? Why do I only ever write about writing?<br />
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Or about Toronto? For years I've had a pet theory about Toronto mayoralty races since Toronto was amalgamated in 1998, and the current race, which I'm thankfully out of the country for, is a chance for this theory to really shine. So I'm going to put it out there, in part because one of Olivia Chow's former advisors, Warren Kinsella, is asking <a href="http://warrenkinsella.com/2014/09/topoli-question/">this very question</a>.<br />
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I call it the "Underdog Theory". It's a pretty simple theory, but I've never seen anyone else write about it, and it's so far been a nearly universal predictor of who will become the next Mayor of Toronto.<br />
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Here goes: About a year (or even earlier) before the actual election, journalists in Toronto begin to create "buzz" about the next big candidate (if there's no incumbent mayor). This buzz is amplified by polling firms, who take the conjecture of the media, and ask people who they might vote for, and also by the people who might want to be mayor. This person, for the purposes of my theory, I've named the "consensus candidate". By this I mean that person who, long before most people are thinking seriously about the election, and before anyone could even reasonably consider running, has been chosen by the media as the front runner.<br />
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So for example, before the 1998 and 2003 elections, the frontrunner a year out was Barbara Hall. After David Miller decided to step down, the consensus front runner was George Smitherman. Do you notice anything about these frontrunners? They never win.<br />
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Who wins? Well, it seems to be the person who somehow bucks the consensus. What's interesting about this is that it doesn't seem to have much to do with ideology - David Miller won mainly by being the lone candidate to campaign again the island airport, and Rob Ford won mainly because he represented an outsider looking into City Council.<br />
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So this is to me what makes this current race pretty interesting. Firstly, we have an incumbent (or had I should say now). But I think that, given everything that went on, including the fact that his powers were stripped from him, the current race was functioning effectively as one without an incumbent.<br />
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Now if anyone is actually reading this, and has bothered to stay with me so far, let's look at the consensus candidate from a year ago - Olivia Chow. Does everyone remember all the stories about how polls showed that only Chow could beat Rob Ford at the polls? When I saw this, my first reaction to it was "uh-oh".<br />
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I reacted this way for two reasons - firstly, at the time I thought this time might be the race that refutes my pet theory, and that would bruise my ego. Secondly, I thought to myself, well if she's isn't going to win, who will, and the odds are that person is going to be awful.<br />
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So here we are a month out, and guess what? Olivia Chow has basically disappeared from the race, and could sink to Joe Pantalone levels of support, and John Tory, who lost to Rob Ford, has come from below to steal the race from her, although as I've argued, she was screwed the day everyone said she would be the one to win!<br />
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But then Rob Ford got cancer, and his brother stepped in. I cannot help but look at Doug Ford and see him as the new underdog, especially here in the bucolic splendour of Wolfenbüttel! <br />
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Here's the thing - John Tory has been leading for some time now, and Doug Ford, whether or not deserves it, can pretty much count on all of Rob Ford's support. What remains to be seen is whether or not the huge group of people who voted for Rob Ford but never admitted it to people (a tendency which, given the whole crack scandal, is strangely literary in its foreshadowing...) are prepared to switch their votes from Tory to Doug Ford.<br />
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Honestly, I don't know. But now that I have finally had the courage to state my pet theory, I look forward to its refutation. Mainly because the thing that seems really clear to me, if my theory is actually operating (somewhere) in the hive mind of the Toronto voting public, it's that the race for mayor has nothing to do with governance, or ideology. <br />
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It's about something else. I still haven't found a way to articulate what that else is, but it seems to have less to do with politics, and more to do with anxiety about "elites". But I've already gone on too long.<br />
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With any luck, the next time I write on the blog won't be six months from now! <br />
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<br />Andrew W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.com0