Nein Quarterly

The biggest problem with being such a terribly inconsistent blogger is that my many plans never come to fruition. Worse, I never even tell anyone about those plans that never come to fruition!

But at one point, I thought to myself, "Hey, I'm a Germanist, getting a PhD at a German department at an actual university!" (In fact, that is how many of you have found me!) Thought continued - "I should strive to become the biggest Germanist in the blogosphere! Yeah, I'm going to focus on that, oh hey look, a dog with a puffy tail! Come here Puff Puff!"

Anyway, as someone who has actually publicly defended Adorno on jazz, all I can say is that I wish I had come up with something like Nein Quarterly because it's both funny and also sounds a lot like this character I do for a very, very, very small group of people...but 36,000 followers for a Germanist making fun of Germans is impressive.

I guess I can give up my dream of being the Fü-, no wait, that's not good, I mean the top Germanist online...

Yes, it is crazy that I'm promoting a twitter feed, but here we are, where blogging is an old-fashioned medium, and twitter is the telegraph of our age. I think it was Hegel who said that the Owl of Minerva, who made it difficult to listen to Beethoven because it would not stop hooting, was the Pudelskern of modernity, but Twitter is something, I think!

Sad but True

There was a time when I hoped that this blog, if nothing else, would land me some free review copies of classical CDs/DVDs and books. That really seems insane to me now, not just because I never really put the work into this blog to justify anyone sending me anything, but because I thought that marketing other people's work because they sent it to me for free would be a good thing for me and this blog.

Einbahnstrasse as a Lost Paradigm for Blogging

So I'm re-reading Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street and it occurs to me, as I suspect it occurs to nearly everyone, just how bloggy it is. The discrete sections, seemingly unrelated, yet which nonetheless amount to a whole - could there be a better description of the experience of reading a blog? (It should come as no surprise that there is a One-Way Street blog)

There is a difference between the average blog and Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse - Benjamin intended his bits and pieces to come together, he slaved over their order of presentation (He reminds one of Wittgenstein in this respect).

Wasn't this the great, yet unrealized promise of blogging? That at the end (or along the way) many of them should be turned into a book? Blogging now feels less writing creating a book on the side, and more like maintaining the cork board at a Student Centre, so that the advertising of piano lessons and the selling of bicycles remains a satisfying experience for the student consumer. That being said, I suppose it is some badge of honour that the most regular visitors to my blog are people who come to crib materials for their undergraduate essays on Aristotle. Welcome cheaters! Bask in the illusory authority of the Internet, where what I write looks good, but could be entirely wrong, and all my citations made up just like in Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive.

Kids are learning Socialism instead of Math! Or, why do so many adults hate the fact that we no longer beat children in schools anymore?

I knew I shouldn't have clicked on this Margaret Wente article, about how "the system" is failing Canadian kids at math.

But I did, in part beacuse a) my son has started school again, and b) he seems to have a hell of a lot of math classes! In fact, math seems to squeeze everything else out of his education this year. The fact that Wente claims that math is all but invisible in her column set off my BS-detector because it's the exact opposite of what an actual child in the Canadian school system is actually experiencing.

Maybe it's a trick by the teacher to teach them about the wonders of Stalin and the glories of East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, but I'm going to hedge my bets and say that the schedule is accurate, and that he's spending more time doing math than any other subject, by a considerable margin.

It is true, however, that last year's math test scores in Ontario are a bit lower in Grade 3 and 6 than they have been in the past 5 years. And it's true that there might be a trend there. But the pedagogical "issues" Margaret Wente is describing have been around since I was in school in the very late 1970's.

As always, I both encourage you and discourage you from reading the comments. They are the usual miasma of incohate rage and conjecture about how no longer forcing children to memorize times tables and teaching them creative ways to problem solve is Socialist Liberal Communists ruining our society and "failing our children". Except that it's not true.

I mean, I don't want to say that Margaret Wente is full of shit here, but my own anecdotal evidence is as follows: last year my son learned multiplication tables, as in, he had to memorize them, along with a weekly spelling test where he uh, had to memorize how to spell words correctly. Other kids, not just my son, were also subjected to this kind of rote learning.

He also learned about division and multiplication, and he also learned to add large numbers by stacking them on top of each other. So he, and everyone in his class, learned algoritms and memorized facts at school. Here in Ontario. Last year.

In fact, in what I'm sure would come as a shocking development to Margaret Wente, he was asked to review his multiplication tables over this weekend!

Oddly enough, this is not only how I learned to do math, it's also how my parents learned to do math!

Just a few years ago, I would help my step-daughter with her high school math, and it was all quadratic equations and trigonometry. It was never "Hey, see if you can figure out a cool way to calculate the acceleration of a Care Bear in her Care Car on the way to visit her friend Dora the Explorer in Cuddle Land, if Dora is 3.4 cuddle units from Careland and it takes her 12 love time units to get there? Please tweet your most creative attempt and then like it on Facebook".

So are these people telling us that kids aren't learning to do division or multiplication the old-fashioned way? Yes. Are they completely full of shit for reasons that I do not at all understand? Also yes.

Is the problem here that school is, at least to adults, more enjoyable now? It's as though all these grown ups recall school as being this soul-crushing experience of constantly having to memorize facts and figures, and in true modern Canadian fashion, instead of thinking that there might be a better way, instead believe that this young generation should be subjected to the same things that turned Margaret Wente into Margaret Wente?

Then there's this. Most adults I know are terrible at math, even those who were taught in the good old days back before "student-centred learning" became all the rage. How many of these self-righteous turds could help their children with math past Grade 6?

Perhaps the Ontario government should start measuring that, because I bet the results would shock the same mean-spirited jerks tut-tutting the current state of Canadian education. You who were products of that old system, many of you also suck at math.

By the way, the old system sounds pretty crappy. My parents grew up in the good old days of learning, and do you know what I took away from it listening to their stories as a kid? That most teachers in the old days were masochistic assholes who liked nothing more than to hit kids with straps and to treat kids they didn't really like with utter contempt or disdain.

Do you know what the approach was back in the day if you were bad at math or anything? It was to write you off! "Hey kid, there's always bricklaying or the steno pool! HA HA!"

Margaret Wente pines for the days when the switch was plentiful, and rote memorization was everywhere. This says a lot more about Margaret Wente than it does about what kids are actually taught in Ontario, which, if my son is anyone to go by, is basically the exact same stuff I did, except with more empathy.

If empathy is that bothers you about schools today, then maybe you're the problem.

A Sad Thought

For a few years now, I have been making the rather pessimistic prediction to friends and family that in 10 years, Canada will, in most respects, be to the right politically of the United States. My contention was that it would happen almost happen without a word, and Canadians would only realise it when it was far too late.

Does Anyone Remember John Weinzweig?

Canadian composer John Weinzeig would have turned 100 this year.  The Toronto Star had a nice overview of what's going on in celebration of his life. But before I get back to him I have to ask: Do you remember that whole thing about needing a new Hockey Night in Canada theme song?

What do you say about the winner? I say it's really, really kitschy.

Firstly, Bagpipes? And isn't this really just another David Foster Olympic tune, except without the edge? Or are the bagpipes the edge?

The new hockey song isn't bad. It's just kitschy. Which I suppose means really bad, but it doesn't sound really bad, so does that make it a work of genius?

Perhaps I've been reading too much Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, a book I picked up at my favourite bookstore.

It's a depressing read. If you take the book's arguments seriously, basically everything around us is kitsch. As some of the Amazon reviews contend, this could be a "hoplessly outdated" high/low view of art, and I suspect most people who read this book will balk at the possibility that there's this much bad taste out there.
Worse, it was written in the 70's, and as far as I can tell, things have gotten much much worse on the kitch front. At least people way back then came by it honestly! (That's a not very obvious joke right there)
I even found myself looking at the book going "Really? That's kitsch too? Crap! I like that"...he has a special dislike for superheroes - one of the captions for some Batman bedroom wallpaper reads: "The idiotic figures of Batman and Robin raised to the level of unsophisticated decorative fetishes." That, my friends, is contempt! but then again, when you think that superheroes are our biggest, fattest Hollywood spectacles, which people watch while eating an artisinal hamburger with artisinal relish and artisinal kraft dinner made by artisinal artisans from the land of Artisinalia...

Also, my son has a pair of Batman pajamas. He hates them. Now I realise why - my son has an innate hatred of kitsch. God bless that little boy!

I digress...by the end of this exhausting book, I began to dismiss old Professor Dorfles essays as the sad musings of a modern curmudgeon, musings that sound, ahem, a lot like this blog...but just as you get to the end, he makes a case for Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as decidedly unkitschy artists. Why? Because they use kitschy elements...the miasma of kitsch is unstoppable.

My theory as to why kitsch is everywhere? Kitsch is the aesthetic form of late, late, late capitalism. I mean, once you've exhausted handbags and diamond encrusted watches as luxury goods, where else is there to go but down? Rich people want to eat terrible food too, but they don't want to pay terrible food prices! and if you think I'm kidding, the latest issue ot Toronto Life has an article on fancy tater tots! you cannot make this stuff up folks!

But what about that hockey song? I listen again to the not-so-new Canada hockey song, and I recall how excited people in Canada get when Tim Horton's offers to slop chili into a bowl made of bread, and it seems that Professor Dorfles worst fears have been realised as Canadian society. We are so deep in kitsch that we know nearly nothing else. This is where Stephen Harper was deeply wrong about ordinary Canadians not caring about the arts - when it comes to kitsch, it seems both Canadian artists and ordinary people can't get enough of it. I should know, I live near Dundas and Ossington, perhaps the epicentre of artsy kitsch.

So what's all this crap about kitsch got to do with the hockey anthem, or the title of my post?

My suggestion for the hockey anthem - John Weinzweig's Hockey Night in Canada. It's resolutely unkitschy, for the same reasons Warhol and Lichtenstein are. You can listen to it here. Stick - Check- Bodycheck. He takes the kitsch and he stabs it to death right in front of you. And as a choral piece, it reminds us that our experience of hockey on television is very much through the colour commentary. The other theme songs are just there to tell you to sit down on the sofa, Weinzweig reminds you that you're there to be part of a sacred ritual in Canadian society - watching grown men skate around on ice and shoot a vulcanized rubber disk at each other in the hopes of hitting it into a net.

I would gladly watch the first four minutes of Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday to hear it. But then I would probably turn it off.

In other news

Today is the 200th birthday of the Richard Wagner. 

I wish I had something bloggy to say about him, you know, cheeky and showing off how smart and above it all I am, but all I can say is that his operas are some of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced.

As someone also doing a PhD in German, I should especially say something about his impact on German history, but all I can say is that his operas are some of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced.

The Difference between Right and Left

If David Miller, the former mayor of Toronto (and purported socialist) had been caught on tape smoking crack and spewing racial epithets, and Gawker were fundraising $200,000 to get a copy of the tape, they would have raised the money in a single day and we would all be watching it on the Internet, alongside the video of David Miller's resignation.

Funnily enough, I was walking through the Junction a few weeks ago, and David Miller walked past me.  He smiled, and I wished I had said, "we miss you!".  Miller was far from perfect, but he never made Toronto the laughing stock of the world.  Oh but he also raised taxes so he's the devil.

I really do wonder, what would it take for "Ford Nation" to lose faith in this clown?  Given that he's really a cipher for alienated rage, I suppose the answer is nothing, but you are welcome to venture forth in the comments!

But back to my original point.  The reason there is a Ford Nation is because a lot of people here, in fact, about a third of Torontonians, are always out for blood, and they are nearly all completely on the right side of the political equation.  I often try to ask myself, why are these people so angry, but in that anger comes an incredible amount of reality-bending motivation.

How many people on the left could you imagine seeing a video like that of David Miller and then trying to argue it was doctored?  And yet this is the standard line, as though these drug dealers sat some guy in front of  a green screen and then CGI'd Rob Ford into the video!!  Can you imagine how insane that sounds?  It would be cheaper to just outspend him in the next civic election!

No the "left's" actual tactic was to try to have him legally removed from office, which failed.  If the video is real, Rob Ford did this to himself, and not the staff at ILM, who created it while on a break from the latest Star Wars film.

Ugh

Today's been a pretty crazy day here in Toronto.  We had an earthquake this morning, and then the Toronto Star broke a story about a video supposedly showing Rob Ford smoking crack and making racial slurs.

Except the Star didn't break the story.  I happened to be on Gawker last night when they put up the whole thing, read it, (you should too, it's kind of amazing) and then went to the Star to see their reaction.

Except there was nothing there.

Come today, it turns out the Star has been sitting on the story and the released it, and pretended as though it was theirs all along. As a result, there's some pretty funny (and nasty) stuff going on between the Star and Gawker on twitter, which is actually kind of sad, because although Gawker is completely right that the Star is being stupid in claiming this is their story, Gawker doesn't seem to know that the Star, as far as Canadian papers go, is maybe the last bastion of relatively decent journalism in the country and not a front for business interests like the Globe and Mail and National Post.  Instead they're playing the whole "Canadians are dumb boring people who don't really know much about things", except for the fact that they get all the same media as we Americans and watch it obsessively..."


That being said, it's comically cheeky of the Star to call their slightly differing account of the tape an "exclusive", and I can see why people at Gawker, like Tom Scocca, are so angry about it, or at least appear to be really angry about it on twitter.  And it's also annoying for the Star to get all self-righteous about Gawker getting pissed off, given how much of the paper lauds its own muckraking when no one else is doing it.

I'm actually really glad Gawker broke it, in part because Canadians usually only take something seriously when Americans are involved, and it also makes it a lot harder for the usual Ford crowd to merely blame the Star for this.

I guess I'm talking about this and not about the actual video in part because these are the only people to have seen it, and so this is actually the story right now, in which two rare outfits where decent journalism is still practiced are totally crapping over each other. 

That's actually the saddest part because Rob Ford has been a lost cause for so long now that's it's not actually even worth talking about him.

A Tale of Two Columnists

There are two columns worth reading in the Toronto Star today.  Royson James, who I don't always agree with, in part because he constantly plays devil's advocate, has a really nice piece on the issue of the Scarborough subway.  I can't help but wonder if the decision today by Toronto City Council to discuss transit taxes was fuelled in part by James' cogent analysis of the rank hypocrisy that surrounds the debate over whether or not Scarborough should get a subway extension or an LRT.

Although I live in downtown Toronto, and I guess I'm supposed to be at war with people in Scarborough and Etobicoke, my deeply held socialist beliefs force me to believe that if we taxed the hell out of everyone, we could have subways running down every major street in the entire city, whether we needed them or not.  That even includes people who live in Scarborough or Etobicoke or all those something-York areas north of Bloor and West or East of the downtown core are called..

Seriously though, James makes a good point about the actual politics going on, and how the absence of a Scarborough subway isn't necessarily just because we downtowners don't think they deserve one, but that their own representatives on Council are part of the problem.

***

Which brings me to the other column, by Martin Regg Cohn, which concerns the recent Ontario provincial budget.  Unlike James column, Cohn tells us all about the various statistics that show us we're in a slump, and accuses the current Finance minister, Charles Sousa, of ignoring the plight of the Ontario economy. 

The problem with this piece is that Cohn himself admits, at the very end, that there's very little Ontario can do to actually change its position in a national economy run by a federal government more concerned about extracting the remains of long-dead dinosaurs in Alberta than pretty much anything else. 

Instead, he trots out the usual centrist Canadian columnists' bromide about the Ontario government needing to instill "an entrepreneurial spirit in Ontario’s commercial classes" in order to "kick-start" Ontario's economy.  Maybe people aren't feeling so entrepreneurial because that magical market put Ontario into this predicament in the first place.  Does anyone remember the economic meltdown of 2008?  Rescuing the auto industry and such? No?

Perhaps Cohn was trying to be balanced after writing a number of pieces that were more supportive of the Liberals?  And his editor told him he needed some balance?  Maybe I'm just tired of hearing how Ontario's economic problems boil down to some regulatory fiddling and letting "the market" step in and magically figure everything out, and how pointless his column seems, except to allow the trolls who populate the Star website to talk about how if only government got out of the way (because it's always somehow in the way, I guess, building roads, cleaning water and taking away our garbage). 

That's not actually how markets work, ever, and generally, it's when we let the markets do their thing that all hell breaks loose.